Robert Lashley- Can't Find My Way Home

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.

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.

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