Hypertext Magazine asked Robert Krut, author of The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire, “Is your new collection a ‘Los Angeles’ book?”

I do live in Los Angeles, and find it full of endless sparks for writing. My previous book, This Is the Ocean, was firmly an LA-based collection. Looking it over now, I can safely say that a good 90% of its poems were rooted here. With all three of my books, though, I’ve tried to center on one particular scope of geography. The first one, The Spider Sermons, included a lot of big, sweeping landscapes, from the earth-bound (canyons of the southwest, cliffs off Big Sur) to slightly bigger ones (galaxies, the inner ear of a black hole.) Then, for the next collection, I consciously retracted my focus to zero in on the greater Los Angeles area.

There are indeed a lot of city landscapes in the new book, The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire, and many of them are rooted in my adopted hometown. Los Angeles is a body with lots of extremities, which led to poems from the heart of Hollywood, from the beaches of Venice, from the David Lynchian blocks of Burbank, and more. There are a handful of poems in this new book firmly rooted in its streets—the piece (“At This Very Moment”) that includes the book’s title phrase, in fact, is written from the roof of the Eastern Building, looking across downtown LA. From there, though, the poems stretch out further on the map in terms of their settings.

With this new collection, I’ve tried to zoom out again, but in a third calibration. If the first book was intergalactic, and the second was specifically local, this time the poems aimed to look out to cities across the country. During its writing, I found inspiration in a number of locations, and found that creating pieces out of their imagery allowed a larger canvas for ideas. So, while my home base of Los Angeles is still a beating heart in the book, it is not the only setting—there is New York (“The Fog is a Fire, the Fire is a Signal”), Atlanta (“The Party”), New Orleans (“Phantasmagoria at Six AM.”) Other poems try to ping off each other like satellite towers, from cities like Seattle, Birmingham, San Francisco, and more.

With my last book, I wanted to use an intimate view of my own city to echo outward. This time around I wanted the view across the country, to explore how we’re all bound together under similar skies (for better and for worse.) My hope is that anyone reading the poems, anywhere, will connect with something about the landscapes and landmarks, whether they are their own, or entirely new. It is a Los Angeles book in its way, but, ideally, a collection rooted in any American city.

Robert Krut is the author of three books; most recently, his collection The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire (Codhill Press, 2019) received the 2018 Codhill Poetry Award.  Previous books include This Is the Ocean (Bona Fide Books, 2013), recipient of the Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Award, and The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009).  His work has appeared widely both in print and online, in journals like Gulf Coast, Blackbird, Passages North, and more.  He lives in Los Angeles, and teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Writing Program and College of Creative Studies.  More information can be found at www.robert-krut.com.