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Winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Clearing navigates the ever-shifting poles of violence and vulnerability with rich imagination and a singular incisiveness, "asserting feminist viewpoints and mortal terror in lush musical lines" (New York Times). The women in Allison Adair's debut collection--luminous and electric from the first line to the last--live in places that have been excavated for gold and precious ores. They understand the nature of being hollowed out, of being "the planet's stone / core as it tries to carve out one secret place and fails." And so, as these poems take us from the midst of the Civil War to our current era, they chart fairy tales that are at once unsettling and painfully familiar, never forgetting that cruelty compels us to search for tenderness. "What if this time," they ask, "instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have."
Adair sees 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 tension in this work, and its product is wholly "an alchemical feat, turning horror into beauty" (
Boston Globe).
List of contents
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
About the author
Originally from central Pennsylvania, Allison Adair now lives in Boston,
where she teaches at Boston College and GrubStreet. Her poems have appeared in
American
Poetry Review,
Best American Poetry,
Best
New Poets,
Kenyon Review Online,
North American Review,
Threepenny Review, and
ZYZZYVA,
among other journals. Allison is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the
Florida
Review Editors’ Award, the Orlando Prize, and first place in
Mid-American
Review’s Fineline Competition. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
