What Lives in Me - by Robert M Tobias (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

What Lives in Me is a collection of autobiographical poems that explores how a father's judgment can echo across a lifetime. The speaker's father-a 1921-born farm boy, relentless competitor, and hard-edged "man's man"-teaches his son early that failure is unforgivable. By age four, through sharp words and head slaps, the boy has absorbed the lessons: he is not good enough and Real Men never cry.

Through scenes of small-town storefronts, factory floors, classrooms, and family memory, the poems follow him into adulthood-law school, labor organizing, leadership, and the costs of ambition-where the same fear becomes the hidden engine of success, driving him to work harder and longer than those around him.

Taken together, the poems reveal how a father's voice can live inside a son long after childhood ends. Moving from secrecy and shame toward self-recognition, What Lives in Me examines the emotional inheritance in a culture that prizes male toughness over male tenderness.

In confronting the belief that shaped him, the speaker begins the difficult work of reclaiming his own voice shaped by another man's judgement.

Review Quotes

Robert Tobias begins his poignant book of poetry, What Lives in Me, with his birth-difficult not only for his mother, (a 52-hour labor), but also for himself, a "blue and gasping" infant. Childhood illnesses (strep-infused rheumatic fever) and a father (for whom a "sickly" son was a failure) undermined Tobias's confidence and damaged his little heart, physically and metaphorically. Tobias understands how fear continues through schooldays and college years, how even an adult with a "baseball-sized tumor in [his] kidney sac" becomes a frightened 5-year-old when told he "might die." Tobias, union labor lawyer, union president, and the Director of Executive Education at American University, knows fear bedevils us most of our lives, but if we are fortunate as he is, we struggle to learn to be less lonely by trusting our lives and our fears to others. In these honest and thoughtful poems, he shows us how we learn to "ask to be held."

-Lois Marie Harrod, Spat and Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis

Robert Tobias' debut work, What Lives in Me, builds in its sheaf of pages a shape, a ship made of portraits, a lifetime of crossings and movement and change. With remarkable wisdom and emotional intelligence, its speaker guides the reader by the beam of revelation, with even a protective nudge now and then for its protagonist who ages and matures before our eyes. The figure at the center seems shuttled by the sheer will that seems to drive like waves under the boat of his life. A book that holds back nothing, it points its bow to wherever the wind directs it: loss, love, even life's humiliations, even tumult, and ultimately, in the embracing, triumph.

-David Keplinger, Director, MFA Program in Creative Writing, American University

Robert M. Tobias's strong narrative voice is part of why "What Lives in Me" is such a powerful collection of poetry. The poems explore the impact and legacy of a fraught relationship with parents, in a memorable and surprising way. Robert M. Tobias "What Lives in Me" is a remarkable memoir in poetry that builds in a way that is immersive and really resonates with the reader. A wonderful and memorable debut collection.

-Caitlin Thomson, Co-Founder of Authors Publish and her poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead, Jelly Bucket, The Literary Review of Canada, Air/Light, Tar River Poetry, The Adroit Journal, The Moth, The Penn Review, Radar, The Conium Review, and Killer Verse (Knopf)