Part detective novel, part cinematic saga, part street-smart narrative, the poems in The Life of a Hunter form a document of expedition that couples individual discovery with communal transformation. Michelle Robinson's characters are consigned to particular mechanisms of survival to various forms of physical and psychological evolutions--as a reaction to their search for an acceptable spiritual condition. The multiple identities of her pressured characters are susceptible to physical transformations that provide "e;a brief jolt of anesthesia, / instead of the cold tenderness of interruption."e; Robinson uses the culture of film and fiction as an analogy for the world just out of reach and the world already at hand; preoccupied with what precision "e;sounds like,"e; the figures in her poems respond to the possibility of future change as well as the fact that change is a constant in their lives. "e;Don't misunderstand. It was the most cynical year of our era / and anything would have been better than to have been asked / to find something beautiful."e; Robinson's is a strong young voice, detached and observant yet disturbingly present.