How to Rob a Convenience Store is a collection of original poems written to change perspectives on guns and the effects of gun violence. Copies of this chapbook can be obtained from Bookshop.org, Amazon and Cowboy Jamboree Press.
A portion of the proceeds from the sales How to Rob a Convenience Store will be donated to The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
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Thank you for buying, reading and sharing this chapbook.
on the move in the
Capital Region
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In partnership with the Hudson Valley Writers Guild, the POW! Poems on Wheels project is bringing poetry to homebound seniors throughout the Capital Region. Participating Offices of the Aging in Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga and Schenectady counties receive printed poem cards to be distributed to 2,000 recipients of Meals on Wheels and other food delivery programs.
The brainchild of local poets Rhonda Rosenheck and Rachel R. Baum, Capital Region POW! Poems on Wheels is based on the belief that poetry can connect people to, and through, our shared humanity. Poems offer a peek into the poet’s mind and hold up a mirror for readers to explore their own ideas, memories and emotions.
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The Poems on Wheels program originated with the Poetry Society of America, which distributed poem cards to seniors in large cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles. It recognizes that elderly or otherwise homebound people not only face issues around food insecurity and social isolation, but also cultural, intellectual and emotional isolation.
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The Capital Region POW! program begins with a card printed with the poem Moods by Sara Teasdale, a work that is in the public domain, so that copyright is not an issue. The cards are being placed in food bags, trays and packages, reaching the homebound in time for the holiday season. Future poem cards are dependent on additional funding.
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The Hudson Valley Writers Guild supports POW! Poetry on Wheels and the region’s entire literary community. Read more poetry and prose, and find events to attend (in person and remote), at www.hvwg.org.
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Members of HVWG are invited to submit poems for the 2025 Poems on Wheels program.
For more information about Poems on Wheels, email poemsonwheelshvwg@gmail.com.
Advance praise for
How to Rob a Convenience Store
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From Dean Rader, PhD, co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence (Beacon Press, 2017), winner of the Writer’s League of Texas Poetry Prize:
"In Rachel Baum's powerful collection of poems, How to Rob A Convenience Store, the last line of one poem often bleeds into the first line of the next one. This metaphor of concatenation literalizes the many ways in which we are interconnected through the histories of gun violence. One incident bleeds into the next, one death bleeds into another. 'Concentrate,' Baum writes in a poem, 'because no one can stop the future.' Baum is no doubt correct. But, if we can't stop the future, perhaps we can change it. In these raw, angry, hopeful poems, Baum begins to show us the way."
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From Tara Bray, author of Mistaken for Song (Persea, 2009), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize:
"Subways, Fourth of July parades, synagogues, malls, schools—no place is safe. The stunning poems of Rachel R. Baum take us back to these familiar human landscapes now painted with the gun violence that has become part of daily life in America. Her poems show us the price we pay for the gun that has permeated American culture, the gun that is glorified by some, wreaks havoc for others, and of course kills and maims. She recognizes the “ghosts left lingering” for so many who have been affected by a gun, and our collective need to “look up to search the sky for a glimpse of sunlight,” and still, these poems do not look away. They consider the perspective of the victims, perpetrators, and especially those left behind to pick up their lives in the aftermath, those with no other choice but to go on in a world with “the thunder of guns in the distance.” These are important, bold and haunting poems. Read them and be changed."
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From B. Fulton Jennes, Poet Laureate of Ridgefield, Connecticut, and author of Blinded Birds (Finishing Line Press, 2022), winner of the 2022 International Book Award:
"Rachel R. Baum’s How to Rob a Convenience Store opens with a Malala Yousafzai quote: 'I believe the gun has no power at all'—meant, of course, as an empowering rebuke of the gun violence that was directed against her. But in poems linked together not only by last lines repeated, crown-sonnet style, as the first line of the following poem but also by their anti-gun-violence theme, Baum shows us the devastating after effects, the causes and, yes, the power of our nation’s pervasive gun culture. A rodeo winner by day who becomes a domestic abuser by night…the lament of a parent whose teen committed suicide with a gun…the outcast kid who was about to change the order of things at school…the child who discovers a gun in his parents’ bedroom and become a super hero…a mother running from gun fire with her children…a failed shoe salesman who packs two suitcases of guns, hunting for dignity—the scenes are all too familiar, all too American, all too preventable. 'I write poems about guns to try and make some sense where there is none' Baum writes in her preface. Welcome to America."
