Necessary Clearings

"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