Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Necessary Clearings

Necessary Clearings

Clark, Jennifer

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $14.00

ISBN10: 0985315148
ISBN13: 9780985315146
Publisher: Shabda Press
Published: Jun 22 2014
Pages: 88
Weight: 0.31
Height: 0.21 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A warning to the reader: you will need an oven mitt to hold this heart-searing book. Replete with vision, wit, and imagistic precision, the poems in this collection enact glacially inside the reader. They gouge out new landscapes and redefine the emotional interior. Jennifer Clark feeds us our spiritual oats in the form of a toddler, a dying friend, a bat attaching itself to the space shuttle during lift off. She makes everything she touches holy. She dips her paint brush into fire and vision creating such potent undertows, we drown and grieve with her. But wait, she seems to whisper to us in other poems, it's time to get up and dance. She inspires us to bang pots and the lids of pans together like a child and revel in the living. Now open this book and read, become-through the power of her poems-exquisitely human again. --John Rybicki, author of When All the World Is Old In Jennifer Clark's Necessary Clearings a small girl watching smoke rings attempts to marry the moment by sliding one onto her finger, a young mother holding her son admits even this moment is ending. Everything in this collection bears witness to the disappearing world, and to Clark's desire to stay the moment with words. Graylings, gardening neighbors, even freezers die -- Fix her, fix, her, fix her, prays the daughter of an ailing mother. Yet death and decaying bones share a world with blueberries and goldfinches and astral nurseries where stars are being born, even if their light will take 22 million years to reach us. Necessary Clearings takes place in the tensions between these truths. These are the poems we need while we wait it out. --Susan Blackwell Ramsey, author of A Mind Like This, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry

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