Sundress Reads: Review of How to Rob a Convenience Store

Rachel R. Baum’s How to Rob a Convenience Store (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2024) is a collection of interconnected poems that highlight the banalization of gun culture, the power associated with guns, as well as the endless dangers and loss surrounding their pervasive presence. Each poem is laced with tension and discomfort, so readers never drop their guard in the fictitious small American town that Baum erects with each word. 

Stylistically, each poem begins the last thread of the previous one, and each speaker belongs to the same imagined small town. As with any community, the actions of one have consequences on another. It was particularly smart to build the poetry collection like that so that the sense of discomfort is heightened. For when a school shooter is carefully crafting their plan, the reader knows the perspective of their victims will also be present.

Each character we accompany has their own relationship with guns, but the common ground is the immense power that guns symbolize for either the carrier or the ones surrounding them. The reader may feel claustrophobic at the start of this collection populated by guns, which mark a casual appearance in all the poems. For example, in “Rodeo Winner,” they’re described “like [they’re] just another extra fork” (Baum 10). Everyone carries guns. They’re in the back of the car, on the bedside table, in the back pocket. They’re the driving force of the narrative, responsible for the lives lost, the trauma of their survivors, and the fear of what their violence is yet to bring. Baum’s strength lies in how little she has to say to make the reader uncomfortable, carefully constructing each verse in a way that feels both nonchalant and calculated.

Baum’s poems explore the connection between patriarchy and masculinity with each male speaker evoking danger. The men in this Americana small town need guns to feel in control, to avenge themselves, and to reach a God-like feeling. With a gun, the lonely and abused feel they can make others pay, and so they’re “ready for glory, ready to execute” (Baum 18); they can be the “super hero in this movie posing, pistol pointed at the mirror” (Baum 20). And so they have their rituals; they clean their guns with care, store them away, and get the necessary license. They are so in tune with their guns that a life without them seems devoid of meaning. After all, guns are the easiest way for men to assert dominance, which is essential to their views on masculinity and a clear symptom of a patriarchal society that commends the authority of strong men. Cultural shifts have put into question much of the patriarchy’s core system; guns, these men feel, might just be the quickest way to reassert it all.

The aftermath is described in families missing someone, in funerals that seem almost recurrent, in the malls that fall into a frenzy, in the girls and women subjected to their violence, and even in the guilt of those who sell the very guns that empty the streets. In “Like Mercury,” Baum depicts schoolchildren “holding their teachers’ hands, no talking, only texting their mothers goodbye” (Baum, page 41). Baum sprinkles these heavy details as she narrates the happenings of this small town, allowing the reader to deeply connect to characters and speakers that will be gone come the next poem, making it a memorable reading experience.

In the title poem, “How to rob a convenience store,” the speaker is desperate and decides that they need the gun as a prop to obtain food essentials. It is paramount that in their anxiety, they dehumanize those they are about to traumatize. Gun pointed at the counter, we never find if the promise of violence nestled in bullets comes through. It’s up to the reader to imagine the rest. As the central poem in the collection, it falls right in the middle of the narrative; it is also the one where the speaker/gun-holder is well aware that what they’re doing is wrong and is afraid of the gun themselves. It is almost like Baum is taking a pulse checking, and validating the reader’s unease by making it very obvious that the presence of guns is dangerous in and of itself. Their mere existence is violent.

If the author’s objective was to start a discussion around guns by displaying all the ways they impact communities due to their normalization, it seems that this goal was achieved. It would be impossible for a reader to not feel that this is a somewhat dystopian way of life, one that is unfortunately very close to real life. With ever-rising figures of deaths caused by gun violence, it is appalling that our society accepts their ownership as the norm with Americans purchasing nearly 1.4 million firearms per month in 2024, according to a study. The disquiet that accompanies us after finishing the collection remains as numbing as the silence that follows the explosive noise of a gunshot due to Baum’s powerful exposition and well-thought-through narrative.

How to Rob a Convenience Store is available from Cowboy Jamboree Press

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Ines Pinto (she/her) is from a small beach town near Lisbon, Portugal. She decided to leave those shores behind as she moved around Europe, eventually completing her master’s degree in International Politics. She dreams of a fairer world, so she worked in the non-profit sector to call for the end of corruption and dirty money flows before moving to New York to start a brand new adventure. She is also the proud mother of a spoiled cat named Louis, a certified multilingual Eurovision fan, and a reader with an appreciation for all genres.