Published in September 2019 by Main Street Rag Publishing Company, November Weather Spell is my debut chapbook collection.
Purchase November Weather Spell at Main Street Rag Bookstore
Reviews of November Weather Spell:
Review by Evan Reibsome, published at Whale Road Review
Back-cover Blurbs for November Weather Spell:
I’ve read these poems with acute pleasure, hearing the voice of a real poet. Robert Fillman has the intensity of vision that makes for good poetry, as description yields again and again to revelation. There is a pitch to his voice that is at once original and yet fully attuned to the past. Here is a poet who has read wide and thought deeply, and November Weather Spell, with its seasons of the spirit, introduces an important new poet to the world.
~Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015
Robert Fillman’s November Weather Spell is a poetic landscape of gritty survival. In his world, a little boy packs rocks into snowballs for revenge, an eccentric neighbor asks the devil to dispense of troublesome children, and a young man hears the song of a dead childhood friend. In this superb debut collection, Fillman intertwines memory and current narratives, all while reminding us of the emotional power of place.
~Karen J. Weyant, author of Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt
Whether a raccoon run over by a car, “twitching like a defective // record, needle tripping // a groove,” a mischief of schoolkids sporting rattails, a crazy neighbor, a dead cat, Elsie—alluding to WCW’s housekeeper and the famous poem—or a hairdresser, Robert Fillman’s vehicles for his poems in November Weather Spell provoke us to see greater truths about the importance and dangers of influence and how we manage and mismanage our identities.
~Adam Vines, author of Out of Speech and editor of Birmingham Poetry Review