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Tom Roby's second book, Shape Shifter, displays his versitility as a poet. His poetic styles change, transform, and reflect back on themselves. These poems are tight, descriptive, and insightful. Tom is a Chicago poet who is the president of The Poets' Club of Chicago. Take a look at the poems in the book linked to on this webpage. I'm sure you will enjoy them immensely. Even enough to want the book for yourself.
Tom Roby, his book, and his title poem are all shape shifters, taking us on journeys that remember life’s stages, show their circumstances, and reveal their characters, in their ironic, humorous, serious, and fantastical realities. Yet his poems never lose his identity, leaving us with that same delight as we imagine with him a plastic bag floating from gull to jellyfish to albino cat.
                    Wayne Allen Jones
                    Publisher, Fractal Edge Press
Tom Roby’s work proves that poetry can be esthetic, earthy, abstract, concrete, tender, gritty, avant-garde, nostalgic and even humorous. He not only shifts shapes, he shifts moods, views, styles, and all the reader’s gears. Running a gamut of many multiples, he proves himself a oner who is also a winner.
                    Glenna Holloway
                    Founder of The Illinois State Poetry Society
                    Winner Pushcart Prize
Like the Shape Shifter of its title, Tom Roby's latest collection of poems is by turns elegant and urbane, lowdown and urban, a graceful passage through a real life from courtship to classroom, from childhood to neighborhood — never flinching, never sentimental — and always, always witty and smart.
                    Larry Janowski
                    Author of BrotherKeeper
                    Associate Professor, Dominican University, Forest Park IL