Backlit

In Backlit, Liz Robbins pulls us beneath the fluorescence of a Florida night, where palms sway in the wind and the air thickens with danger. These poems speak in the raw voices of sex workers who navigate power plays like intersections, where every choice costs something and trust is both weapon and wound. Along the strip motels and sun-bleached parking lots, fear hums under the skin, and each transaction teeters between endurance and surrender—measured in minutes, cash, and control. Robbins makes beauty out of this tension, her poems burning with heat and exhaustion, lit by the fragile voltage of power, risk, and the constant gamble of survival.