Poetry. "Here is some sorcery, not necessarily explicable. Here is the invisible; Robert Ostrom traffics in it. The poems of THE YOUNGEST BUTCHER IN ILLIONOIS are some of the most gifted I’ve ever read. ’We are not safe, ’ he writes--but nor would we ever, for a moment (here) want to be. There’s something oddly shy about the way these poems comport themselves, but the imagination is brazen with yearning. The authority of craft is bracing: the lines are sutured but there are no scars. The dark, passionate, miniature universe Ostrom has composed is seductive and whimsical. This is a new voice--edgy, stricken with attentiveness, soft-spoken, numinous. Take him at his word."--Lucie Brock-Broido