Winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Clearing is ""a lush, lyrical book about a world where women are meant to carry things to safety and men leave decisively.""
Luminous and electric from the first line to the last, Allison Adair's debut collection navigates the ever-shifting poles of violence and vulnerability with a singular incisiveness and a rich imagination. The women in these poems live in places that have been excavated for gold and precious ores, and they understand the nature of being hollowed out. From the midst of the Civil War to our current era, Adair charts fairy tales that are painfully familiar, never forgetting that cruelty compels us to search for tenderness. Here we wonder, ""What if this time instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have""?
The Clearing knows the dirt beneath our nails, both alone and as a country, and pries it gently loose until we remember something of who we are, ""from before...from a similar injury or kiss."" There is a dark beauty in this work, and Adair is a skilled stenographer of the silences around which we orbit. Described by Henri Cole as ""haunting and dirt caked,"" her unromantic poems of girlhood, nature, and family linger with an uncommon, unsettling resonance.
By:
Allison Adair
Imprint: Milkweed Editions
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 215mm,
Width: 165mm,
ISBN: 9781571315144
ISBN 10: 1571315144
Series: Max Ritvo Poetry Prize
Pages: 96
Publication Date: 25 June 2020
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
The Clearing I After the Police Have Been Called Letter to My Niece, in Silverton, Colorado As for the Glossy Green Tractor You Were Miscarriage Week Six of the Fire Self-Portrait as Cenotaph Hitching Debt First Plow at Red Mountain Pass Herr's Ridge, 1983: A Reenactment Fine Arts Angelus Silverton What We Should Really Be Afraid Of II Fable Ways to Describe a Death Inside Your Own Living Body Mother of 2 Stabbed to Death in Silverton Local Music Gettysburg Advice for the New Mother Crown Cinquain for the Tattooed Man I Refused He Waited for Days As I Near Forty I Think of You Then When Horses Turn Down the Road Letter to My Foundling: #235, Boy Memento Mori: Bell Jar with Suspended Child III Western Slope Whale Fall If Imagination and Memory Met Unexpectedly, One Last Time Morning Tea Mine Fire at Centralia Stopping Over the Arno City Life Flight Theory What Falls Behind No Response Recurring Dream Crown Cinquain for a Lost Child, Eight Years Later At the Park One Day, My Six-Year-Old Asks If Mermaids Are Real The Age We Were Local History River Bone Honey Disaster at Gold King Mine The Big Thinkers RD 8 Box 16A (Rural Route) Bear Fight in Rockaway
Allison Adair's poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Kenyon Review Online, North American Review, and ZYZZYVA, among other journals. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors' Award, the Orlando Prize, and first place in Mid-American Review's Fineline Competition, she holds a MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Originally from central Pennsylvania, Allison Adair lives in Boston.
Reviews for The Clearing: Poems
A dark and bodily nod to folk- and fairy-tale energy. -Boston Globe The Clearing is a lush, lyrical book about a world where women are meant to carry things to safety and men leave decisively. Out of dry farming soil come these wise, mineral-like poems about young motherhood, mining disasters, miscarriages, memory, and much more. Allison Adair's poems are haunting and dirt caked, but there is also a tense beauty everywhere. I found The Clearing devastating. -Henri Cole 'What if this time instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have...' So begins Allison Adair's The Clearing, the title poem leading us, tooth by tooth, line by line, into this dark forest of a book. Adair's phrases are spell-like, their ingredients mixed in surprising, potent ways: 'the fat matter of memory,' a caterpillar's 'sad accordion hymn,' the 'Gregorian green singing grass.' I would follow this poet wherever her mind goes-even into the deepest woods, into memories of grief and loss-and I would trust her words to lead me out again. The Clearing is brilliant, gutting, completely original. -Maggie Smith
- Winner of Max Ritvo Poetry Prize 2019 (United States)
