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Among Clarence Major’s previous sixteen poetry collections are Swallow the Lake (a National Council on the Arts winner), Configurations: New and Selected Poems (a National Book Award Bronze Medal winner), and Sporadic Troubleshooting (2022). He has contributed poetry to the New Yorker, Harvard Review, American Scholar, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Literary Review, Ploughshares, and dozens of other periodicals. A Fulbright scholar, among Major’s other awards are a Western States Book Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and a PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Literature. He was elected to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2021. Major is a distinguished professor emeritus of twentieth-century American literature at the University of California, Davis.
“The deep cinematic beauty and elegant directness that has made Clarence Major’s work so essential for decades to readers and writers of poems is on full display in Four Days in Algeria. In this engrossing and endearing book, we are whisked away on adventure after adventure—the poet is a globe-trotting griot, and we are blessed to travel with him—to see, sense, taste, smell, and love the world wherever he encounters it. This is a book full of delicious and sensual surprises. Clarence Major’s poems are a feast to be reckoned with, and it’s an honor to follow his global footsteps in this masterpiece of a book.” —Allison Joseph, author of Lexicon and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman “Four Days in Algeria strolls and accumulates its way, layer upon layer, until it catches 'the intensity, the throbbing of life' only poetry, and a writer of this skill, can craft. What an uncanny world Clarence Major sings. A very powerful book!” —Cornelius Eady, author of Hardheaded Weather and Brutal Imagination “Radiant with attentiveness and loving compassion, every poem in Four Days in Algeria brings the world closer, simultaneously embracing both the other and the reader with knowledge and tenderness. ‘Sunlight pours in’! Such a beautiful book!” —Rikki Ducornet, author of Brightfellow
