Vulnerability Index

Poems from the halls of shelters, courthouses, and soup kitchens

During Elizabeth Robinson’s six years working with chronically unhoused people in Boulder, Colorado, her relationships with the community’s most vulnerable deepened—even as they were filtered through a web of paperwork, systems, and strictures. The Vulnerability Index questionnaire is just one such system. Ubiquitous in shelters across America, it is representative of the endless tasks that people living on the street must complete to receive even minor assistance. 

Moving between the local court, jail, shelter, and soup kitchen, Robinson’s poems capture the strange juxtapositions of the intimate, bureaucratic, and absurd that such spaces demand: a frostbite victim wants to share his state-sponsored recovery room with a friend from the street, a domestic violence survivor must change her name and even her social security number, an unhoused activist joins a vigil for another woman only to discover that she is, mistakenly, the person being mourned. Spare yet richly empathetic, Robinson’s verse works to implicate the reader’s own vulnerability on every page.