Description
Can’t Find My Way Home: Twenty Years of Poems: 2005 – 2025
by Robert Lashley
Publication Date: April 25, 2026
About the Book
Spanning two decades, Can’t Find My Way Home is Robert Lashley’s searing collection of selected poems, a chronicle of Black life shaped by memory, migration, and resistance. These poems move through city blocks, bus stops, churches, and dreamscapes, documenting everyday survival amid systemic violence and spiritual exhaustion.
Lashley’s work draws on gospel, literary, and experimental lyric traditions, creating a powerful hybrid voice that is both politically urgent and formally inventive. Lashley’s poems transform everyday urban experience into ritual and revelation. The result is a deeply moving, uncompromising collection that frames poetry as both mourning practice and survival technology. This collection will resonate with readers of social witness literature and experimental poetics.
The collection is introduced by Rae Miqueli, whose opening essay acts as both invocation and threshold: she invites the reader to encounter these poems not as text alone, but as lived experience—something to be felt in the body, in rhythm and memory, in the ache of place and the persistence of ghosted histories. Her introduction situates the work inside a geography of return and rupture, priming the reader to enter Lashley’s world with openness to disorientation, recognition, and transformation.
Endorsed by a cohort of acclaimed and widely recognized writers—including Hanif Abdurraqib, E. J. Koh, Gabrielle Bates, and others—this collection stands as both a major artistic achievement and a vital document of contemporary Black poetics.
Categories: Poetry
ISBN: 978-1-967633-10-4
Trim Size: 9” x 6”
Publisher: Blue Cactus Press
Praise for Can’t Find My Way Home
“What sound and kinesis! … It’s wonderful what’s happening here, within and without, and I can read another thousand pages.” — E.J. Koh, author of The Liberators and The Magical Language of Others
“The gift of a Robert Lashley poem, a gift that is on full display in this volume, is that the poem begins and continues to unfurl and unfurl, reaching one crescendo and then riding the wave into another crescendo. There is no point at which a Robert Lashley poem feels like it has reached a peak, because it begins at the peak and continues to ascend, giving you wings along with it. To see years of his stunning work and undeniable voice laid out in this way is an incredible gift.” — Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America and A Fortune for Your Disaster
“Robert Lashley’s Can’t Find My Way Home is the closest poetry can get to music, a book you could dance to. Moments of everyday life are mythological, friends at a barbecue are gods, and the classical and contemporary exist in the same moments of linguistic grace.” — Harper Galvin
“For over two decades, Robert Lashley has been one of the most necessary voices in the Pacific Northwest literary community. In Can’t Find My Way Home, a collection of selected poems, we are reminded of Lashley’s unique gift for fearlessly writing place, lineage, the church, and the complexities of Blackness. Whether he is employing the villanelle, evoking past poets like W.B Yeats, Langston Hughes, or W.H. Auden, or reintroducing us to figures from his previous works, such as Uncle Moe or the Homeboy, Lashley delivers powerful music on each page.” — Mckendy Fils-Aimé, author of Sipèstisyon
“Robert Lashley is the kind of poet whose verse reliably awakens a room. I have long loved how this writer concentrates and enlivens my experience of literary time, weaving contemporary diction with traditional poetic modes to create places where the present and the past become, in the air and on the page, one deep, dynamic event. This abundant selection honors Lashley’s dazzling oeuvre, prodigious talents, and undeniable commitment to the craft.’” — Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat
“Robert Lashley is a master poet. Lashley’s outstanding new collection, Can’t Find My Way Home: Selected Poems, 2005–2025, is worthy of literary praise. He skillfully presents a poetic intellect developed through cultural dialect, imbuing a call to remember vernacular that bears a unique cultural identity. As such, Can’t Find My Way Home is unpretentious, straightforward, and unquestionably authentic. A discerning mind will discover a duality of poetic creativity and lived experience that is undeniably, and to some extent uniquely, Lashley. This collection stands among his finest works and belongs in the pantheon of seminal poetic achievements.” — Emmett Wheatfall, author of Contradictions from an Uncertain Silence
About the Author
Robert Lashley was a 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Trust Fellow, and a nominee for a Stranger Genius Award. His previously published books include Green River Valley (Blue Cactus Press, 2021), Up South (Small Doggies Press, 2017), and The Homeboy Songs (Small Doggies Press, 2014). His poetry has appeared in Terrain, The Seattle Review of Books, NAILED, Poetry Northwest, McSweeney’s, Make It True, Winter In America, Again, and The Cascadia Review, among others. In 2019, Entropy named The Homeboy Songs one of the 25 essential books to come out of Seattle.. His novel, I Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer (Demersal, 2023), was selected as a finalist for a Washington State Book Award in 2024, and in 2025 was selected as one of bookshop.com‘s 30 favorite Black books in the last 10 years. Robert lives in Bellingham.
