Amy M. Clark
Amy M. Clark is the author of the poetry collection Stray Home (University of North Texas Press, 2010), which was the 2009 winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and a 2011 “Poetry Must-Read” selection by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. She is co-author with Molly Peacock of the chapbook A Turn Around the Mansion Grounds: Poems in Conversation & a Conversation (Slapering Hol Press, 2014). Her poems have been published in the anthologies Good Poems, American Places (Viking, 2011) and Old Flame: from the First 10 Years of 32 Poems Magazine (WordFarm, 2013), as well as many journals and magazines. She lives near Boston.
Praise for Roundabout
Intense and intimate, the poems in Amy M. Clark’s splendid second collection, Roundabout, plunge us into a cherished, safe microcosm of two (a mother and a son) that is perpetually threatened, if not by school violence, then by the violence of seemingly safe streets populated by children in parkas and runners in crosswalks. The terrifying ambivalence of American life, with its combination of privilege and love underpinned by specters of fear and abuse, manifests in every page of Roundabout—all balanced by Clark’s near-miraculous craft. No surprise this poet is also a dancer—the triolets that structure each section almost dance off the page. It’s hope for new relationships and a boy’s learning that lift up Clark’s voice and make Roundabout a prism for a modern woman’s modern life.
—Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst: Poems
A woman drives her sleepless infant through one neighborhood after another while, on the radio, the news is suddenly violent. Or she pauses in the middle of a domestic fight to watch that same child as he “settles his little animals into the laundry hamper and takes them out again.” Or she catches a glimpse of a fox crossing the snow in her backyard, disappearing into the woods. The poems in Amy Clark’s Roundabout are plainspoken, intimate, and elegant—but they are also beautifully crafted and psychologically complex, meditating on the vagaries of motherhood, the difficulties of family, and the sudden imposition of violence. This is a wonderful collection, one I’ll return to with pleasure.
—Kevin Prufer, author of How He Loved Them
Reading Amy M. Clark’s Roundabout, I couldn’t help but think of Stanley Kunitz’s belief that the aim of poetry is to convert life into legend. This age’s frenetic pace, fractiousness, and violence (of which guns are emblematic) have ear-wormed their way into our hearts and homes, thereby keeping us on alert. Here, a woman faces an impulse to revise and correct in the light of how we fail others and ourselves. In one poem, on her evening commute home in “record-breaking / cold,” she sees a runner and wonders, “Why can’t you skip tonight? / Who is counting on you?” while in another, after a dying battery sets off a smoke alarm at 3:00 a.m. that her soon-to-be ex-husband, shouting, “Shut up! Shut up!” disarms, she remarks, “Our luxury—shaken by a device / meant to protect us.” In Roundabout, the tether of “clean form” allows the speaker’s eyes to rest on one subject until she can say, “I love it.” Here, depth emerges through the lenses of retrospection and circumspection. Punctuated by triolets for a soon-to-be teenage son in the wake of a divorce, in Roundabout each poem resonates and accrues meaning in a story that yields hard won lessons: that not all questions are answerable, that a child need not choose between a father and a mother, nor a woman between being a woman and mother.
—Debra Kang Dean, author of Totem: America
“Tell me a story,” asks the speaker’s son in Roundabout’s final poem, “one from your life I don’t already know,” and it’s part of the book’s brilliance that by the time we reach the end, we too want more; and we want to turn back, to start over at page one, over and over again. Roundabout. I’ve read it cover to cover three times now and keep finding something new to admire. The attention that Amy M. Clark gives to each detail of a moment is matched only by the care she gives to the craft of poetry itself, every poem here a finely wrought song. Only a poet of precise, unwavering vision can create a work that somehow manages to hold, at once, the whole of life—from a glass of milk to a gun in a closet. It’s all here: every breath and heartbeat, every broken bit and treasure. These poems are both delicate and formidable, as are we. Find comfort in these pages. Find the world reflected back to you in a way that makes you see that we are connected as much by what we love as by what we fear. Find the book you want in your pocket the morning after the world was supposed to end but didn’t.
—Rhett Iseman Trull, editor of Cave Wall and author of The Real Warnings