Overview

An aching meditation on the cyclical nature of grief and memory’s limited capacity to preserve everything time takes from us. How does one make sense of loss—personal and collective? When language and memory are at capacity, where do we turn? Confronted with “a year meant to end all / those to come,” acclaimed poet Adam Clay questions whether anything is “wide enough to contain what’s left / of hope.” In the absence of a clear way forward, the poems of Circle Back wander grief’s strange and winding path. Along the way, the line between reality and dreams blurs: cows stare with otherworldly eyes, 78s play under cactus needles, a father becomes his own child, and the dead become something more complicated—a “sketch turned to painting / left in a room dusty from / lack of passing through.” But amidst these liminal landscapes, a “thread of promise” persists in poetry. As flawed as language is, we still turn to it for longevity, for love, like “Keats, / sketching himself back into place.” Vulnerable and nuanced, Clay details the difficult work of healing—and in doing so, captures those needful moments of reprieve in grief’s “strange circle.” Two friends dashing through a sprinkler. A garden of startled birds. Out for a run some gray morning: a sudden patch of wildflowers. Circle Back is a bared heart, one readers will find as thoughtful as it is tender.

Full Product Details

Author:   Adam Clay
Publisher:   Milkweed Editions
Imprint:   Milkweed Editions
ISBN:  

9781639550982

ISBN 10:   1639550984
Pages:   96
Publication Date:   25 April 2024
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.

Table of Contents

What Forks Will Splinter Probability 1 1. Black-Capped Chickadee: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack 11 Some Mood 12 Shared Custody 13 Poem for a Pandemic 14 Aesthetic 15 Elegy for a Town Built by Trains 16 Where Paradise Lay 17 Best Wishes 18 Two Sides of the Same Coin 19 Strange Belonging 20 The Great Indifference 21 Ecocriticism 22 After Listening to a Podcast About Nuclear Tactical Weapons, I Go Outside to Take In the Sunrise 23 A Year of Dreams Without Birds 24 Finishing Another Book About the World Coming to an End 25 The Bar in Fayetteville Where All the Moms Now Drink 26 2. Framed by the Screen 29 Darkling I Listen 30 Adam Clay 32 Mixtape Archive Circa 1997 33 Iowa Workshop Model 34 Imposter Syndrome While Isolating at Home 35 False Start 36 On Pestilence 37 The Cemetery Where My Grandparents Are Buried 38 Diagnostic Mess 39 On the Day When No One Was Born 40 Grief in a Time of Warming 41 Certain 42 You Can’t Be Against Forever 43 Eternal Things 44 3. Structures of Living 49 Strange Animal Facts 50 Polaroid Elegy 51 Historically Windy Locations 52 Eventually One Point Where We Arrive 53 Facing the Wrong Way 54 Blessedness Is Ours 55 Collegiality Statement 56 Some Internal Aura 57 Figures into Darkness 58 You’re Not a Bee 59 In Place of a Nap 60 In a Silent Way 61 Self-Portrait at Forty-One 63 Settlement 64 What I Pray For 65 Acknowledgments 67

Reviews

"Praise for Circle Back “Circle Back's originality is found in the deep exploration of common shared emotion. Clay uses the singular experience of his speaker, whether through grief, quarantine, the end of the world, as an example we can all relate to. I am struck by his thin flowing strophes that resemble James Schuyler's Morning of the Poem, they move like the unraveling of a thread. There is a sense of continuous falling only to find return again and again to the same conclusions. Clay's intimate and tender interrogation of the state of the world––its nature, its inhabitants, its grief, its joy, its destruction––feel familiar because they are real and we must ask ourselves over and over again, how many times do we have to say something is unraveling before it is too late to sew it back?”— Matthew Buxton, Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, MI Praise for To Make Room for the Sea “[An] accomplished, formally dexterous collection . . . discovering hope and fulfillment in the intricacies of human connection.” —Publishers Weekly “There’s a deep sense of elegy in the collection’s tone. Utilizing a circular rhythm and logic that bends toward return—whether from sleep to wakefulness, or from abstraction to physicality—the poems evoke a complex wistfulness.” —Foreword Reviews “In their lyrical phrasings and human connection to the everyday, the poems in To Make Room for the Sea vividly paint images of the space between known and unknown, the space where hope first takes its hold. The result is a collection of meditative poems that never lose faith in the persistence of the human spirit. Experiencing the world painted by Adam Clay is to discover that most enduring of human traits: the will to survive.” —Southern Review of Books ""With workman-like striving through daily meditations, Adam Clay’s fourth collection, To Make Room for The Sea reads like a prayer. Philosophical, mystical, questioning, well-ensconced in nature and in full dialogue with the American canon, Clay digs deep, sifting through the invisible layers of minor epiphanies to ask what it means to write, remember, act, and be. With humility and wisdom, Clay reaches for the sublime, and more often than not, gains a foothold . . . Mined by quotidian observation, forged by a sharp literary talent, and polished into accessible forms, Clay’s book is an elegiac reservoir, an incantation rippling the surface. And there, at the shore—is hope."" —Rhino Poetry “This book stunned me. From the first poem to the last, I was astonished at Clay’s grounded and lucid style. In this new collection, he grapples with the impermanence of both growth and decay, and the quickly changing state of our planet. However, amidst this mourning, Clay manages to imbue his collection with hope and a yearning for the future.” —Brooks Mellen, Bookshop Santa Cruz “These poems trace the transience of experience and memory, the limits and necessity of language, all while balancing the weight of loneliness and loss with the inertia of hope and awe. Clay has a knack for deft phrasing, for exploring inner vastness, for crafting last lines that stay with you long after the poems end.” —Ben Groner, Parnassus Books “In a time of uncertainty and upheaval, both personal and collective, ‘Life mostly feels like walking the line / between an elegy and an ode’—and the poems in To Make Room for the Sea walk that line, too, between searching and wise, melancholy and hopeful. Perhaps the most seductive part of the book is the questions the poems ask: ‘What replaces the irreplaceable?’ ‘What can be taken back?’ ‘How willful must one / be to stop the body from enacting / the mind?’ And that’s the magic of this book—the way Adam Clay, line after line, enacts the mind on the page.”—Maggie Smith “Whenever I read Adam Clay’s poetry, I find myself slowing down and taking stock of the world around me and within myself. In his recent collection, To Make Room for the Sea, Clay deftly weaves together the vulnerable narrative with the ontological. He examines the situation, perhaps even the origins, of the inner life so that we can live more fully in the outer . . . It’s a journey I certainly recommend.”—The Adroit Journal “Clay converts his powers of observation to a force of love. Because these poems pay such inquisitive and gentle attention to the rooms through which the writer moves, to the faces and phrases he happens upon, they illuminate what the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson calls the 'dear ordinary.' To find the ordinary dear—it is a more difficult task than one might guess. It is also, undoubtedly, a nudge toward kindness.”—Tupelo Quarterly “The more I sit with these poems, the more they resonate with me and with universal patterns & themes — existential inquiries, loneliness, spiritual doubts.” —Green Mountains Review “In Adam Clay’s achingly beautiful new collection, To Make Room for the Sea, love is also and always a story that changes as inevitably as seasons. Within these meditative lyrics, silence never searches for an answer but a mind does, and each poem feels like ‘a prayer for the oldest worlds within us.’ Stretched between grief and praise, Clay studies trees, parenthood, the sky, the moments that make loneliness new. These poems remind me that no matter the losses we face, we hold on because, like blossoms, our survival depends on it.”—Traci Brimhall “With its soaring phrasings, its exquisite collage of major and minor, and its potent imagery of the painter and the painted, Adam Clay's To Make Room For the Sea recalls Joni Mitchell at her most enduring. Time and chance reorganize our lives and selves; Clay's new collection responds with shock and smarts and tenderness and a continuous commitment to dwelling in the space of unknowing. From the hushed and simmering to the nearly operatic, these poems burn bright as the cardinal that ""looked / nuclear at a distance."" They refuse to turn away from the totalizing responsibility we have toward one another: how it undoes us, how it saves us, how it goes on.”—Natalie Shapero “To Make Room for the Sea is an exhibition of what the meditative poem is and what it can do. And Adam Clay wants us to know that one of the things it can indeed do is “Marvel at what the body will do/To survive.” I am most taken by how many times this book risks making use of the word “hope,” and at how each poem that does so earns it every time. This is a beautiful book of persistence, of fatherhood, of romance, of heartbreak, of the American South and what its history can mean for those who leave it and return, and yes, this is a book about faith.”—Jericho Brown  Praise for Stranger “Clay’s absorbing third collection, Stranger, is suffused with desire for recalibration and renewed attentiveness . . . It reveals him to be a subtle topographer of daily life in both its domestic and numinous aspects.”—The Rumpus “Sometimes a poet stops me. Clay’s writing is spiritually superior to any effort I can make to describe it.”—Washington Independent Review of Books “With each deliberate, rigorous, and perfect line, Stranger works itself into a heartbreakingly stunning collection dedicated to the unsung suspension of time that occurs when life suddenly goes awry.”—Ada Limón “I’ve always thought the body to be a kind of mind and in these poems, precise lyrics detailing the most ordinary times, Clay seems—or maybe it only seems he seems—to agree. In those moments when one rearranges the furniture in a room or leaves the cast-iron skillet in the oven or contemplates an ink stain on the wall, Clay finds a space for deep inquiry.”—Kazim Ali “If you’re the type who can’t stomach small talk, Stranger makes for terrific company. Refusing to placate or console his reader, Clay proves himself one of our most challenging and brilliant poets.”—Cate Marvin Praise for A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World “One of the best young American poets writing today, Clay engages fully with the natural world, gracefully dredging up the mysteries embedded in modern life—paper dolls clipped from the morning news, the ringing ears of lightning-strike victims—and bringing ‘the patient sadness that will outwait the memory of a spark’ to life in precise swirls of language. Each poem shimmers with physical and metaphysical insight, and Clay’s endless storms and seasons resonate with wisdom and music. This is a brilliant collection of poems.”—Alex Lemon “These poems are sentient and surprising as only living things can be, intimate and compelling precisely because they don’t aim to please, but to exist. In his own words, reading this book is like ‘centering yourself along unrecorded boundaries’ that Clay has somehow managed to discern for us and translate into poems that are in turns clear and strange, and always warmly memorable.”—Bob Hicok “These poems hover in and out of dreams, follow the mind’s wild wanderings, interrogate language, reveal the heart’s ambitions, all the while remaining brilliantly anchored to the physicality of all things earthbound. This is a book that lives as much in the curious mind as it does in the undeniable weather of the real world, and Clay travels expertly between the two with a gentle, inspired grace.”—Ada Limón “Clay locates the poetic realm at the very limit of what is known, a hotel teetering on the flat world’s precipice, where every visitor is temporary. Not only does one hear Dickinson whisper, ‘My Business is Circumference,’ Clay arrives also with a Whitmanesque capacity for affirmation, ‘The lyrical quality of a weed.’ His poems sing themselves through their own complications, searching for that beautiful order language has no part of, but only language can reveal. ‘May I for a moment be nervous?’ the poet asks. The answer in the poems themselves is their wondrous nerve.”—Dan Beachy-Quick “Immediately striking about the poems in Clay’s second book is their lack of self-consciousness. . . This poet locates himself at the borders between nature and language, solitude and community, the physical and metaphysical where paradox and fragmentation are at once evaded and embraced.”—Publishers Weekly"

"Praise for To Make Room for the Sea""[An] accomplished, formally dexterous collection . . . discovering hope and fulfillment in the intricacies of human connection."" --Publishers Weekly""There's a deep sense of elegy in the collection's tone. Utilizing a circular rhythm and logic that bends toward return--whether from sleep to wakefulness, or from abstraction to physicality--the poems evoke a complex wistfulness."" --Foreword Reviews""In their lyrical phrasings and human connection to the everyday, the poems in To Make Room for the Sea vividly paint images of the space between known and unknown, the space where hope first takes its hold. The result is a collection of meditative poems that never lose faith in the persistence of the human spirit. Experiencing the world painted by Adam Clay is to discover that most enduring of human traits: the will to survive."" --Southern Review of Books""With workman-like striving through daily meditations, Adam Clay's fourth collection, To Make Room for The Sea reads like a prayer. Philosophical, mystical, questioning, well-ensconced in nature and in full dialogue with the American canon, Clay digs deep, sifting through the invisible layers of minor epiphanies to ask what it means to write, remember, act, and be. With humility and wisdom, Clay reaches for the sublime, and more often than not, gains a foothold . . . Mined by quotidian observation, forged by a sharp literary talent, and polished into accessible forms, Clay's book is an elegiac reservoir, an incantation rippling the surface. And there, at the shore--is hope."" --Rhino Poetry""This book stunned me. From the first poem to the last, I was astonished at Clay's grounded and lucid style. In this new collection, he grapples with the impermanence of both growth and decay, and the quickly changing state of our planet. However, amidst this mourning, Clay manages to imbue his collection with hope and a yearning for the future."" --Brooks Mellen, Bookshop Santa Cruz""These poems trace the transience of experience and memory, the limits and necessity of language, all while balancing the weight of loneliness and loss with the inertia of hope and awe. Clay has a knack for deft phrasing, for exploring inner vastness, for crafting last lines that stay with you long after the poems end."" --Ben Groner, Parnassus Books""In a time of uncertainty and upheaval, both personal and collective, 'Life mostly feels like walking the line / between an elegy and an ode'--and the poems in To Make Room for the Sea walk that line, too, between searching and wise, melancholy and hopeful. Perhaps the most seductive part of the book is the questions the poems ask: 'What replaces the irreplaceable?' 'What can be taken back?' 'How willful must one / be to stop the body from enacting / the mind?' And that's the magic of this book--the way Adam Clay, line after line, enacts the mind on the page.""--Maggie Smith""Whenever I read Adam Clay's poetry, I find myself slowing down and taking stock of the world around me and within myself. In his recent collection, To Make Room for the Sea, Clay deftly weaves together the vulnerable narrative with the ontological. He examines the situation, perhaps even the origins, of the inner life so that we can live more fully in the outer . . . It's a journey I certainly recommend.""--The Adroit Journal""Clay converts his powers of observation to a force of love. Because these poems pay such inquisitive and gentle attention to the rooms through which the writer moves, to the faces and phrases he happens upon, they illuminate what the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson calls the 'dear ordinary.' To find the ordinary dear--it is a more difficult task than one might guess. It is also, undoubtedly, a nudge toward kindness.""--Tupelo Quarterly""The more I sit with these poems, the more they resonate with me and with universal patterns & themes -- existential inquiries, loneliness, spiritual doubts."" --Green Mountains Review""In Adam Clay's achingly beautiful new collection, To Make Room for the Sea, love is also and always a story that changes as inevitably as seasons. Within these meditative lyrics, silence never searches for an answer but a mind does, and each poem feels like 'a prayer for the oldest worlds within us.' Stretched between grief and praise, Clay studies trees, parenthood, the sky, the moments that make loneliness new. These poems remind me that no matter the losses we face, we hold on because, like blossoms, our survival depends on it.""--Traci Brimhall""With its soaring phrasings, its exquisite collage of major and minor, and its potent imagery of the painter and the painted, Adam Clay's To Make Room For the Sea recalls Joni Mitchell at her most enduring. Time and chance reorganize our lives and selves; Clay's new collection responds with shock and smarts and tenderness and a continuous commitment to dwelling in the space of unknowing. From the hushed and simmering to the nearly operatic, these poems burn bright as the cardinal that ""looked / nuclear at a distance."" They refuse to turn away from the totalizing responsibility we have toward one another: how it undoes us, how it saves us, how it goes on.""--Natalie Shapero""To Make Room for the Sea is an exhibition of what the meditative poem is and what it can do. And Adam Clay wants us to know that one of the things it can indeed do is ""Marvel at what the body will do/To survive."" I am most taken by how many times this book risks making use of the word ""hope,"" and at how each poem that does so earns it every time. This is a beautiful book of persistence, of fatherhood, of romance, of heartbreak, of the American South and what its history can mean for those who leave it and return, and yes, this is a book about faith.""--Jericho Brown Praise for Stranger""Clay's absorbing third collection, Stranger, is suffused with desire for recalibration and renewed attentiveness . . . It reveals him to be a subtle topographer of daily life in both its domestic and numinous aspects.""--The Rumpus ""Sometimes a poet stops me. Clay's writing is spiritually superior to any effort I can make to describe it.""--Washington Independent Review of Books ""With each deliberate, rigorous, and perfect line, Stranger works itself into a heartbreakingly stunning collection dedicated to the unsung suspension of time that occurs when life suddenly goes awry.""--Ada Limón ""I've always thought the body to be a kind of mind and in these poems, precise lyrics detailing the most ordinary times, Clay seems--or maybe it only seems he seems--to agree. In those moments when one rearranges the furniture in a room or leaves the cast-iron skillet in the oven or contemplates an ink stain on the wall, Clay finds a space for deep inquiry.""--Kazim Ali ""If you're the type who can't stomach small talk, Stranger makes for terrific company. Refusing to placate or console his reader, Clay proves himself one of our most challenging and brilliant poets.""--Cate Marvin Praise for A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World""One of the best young American poets writing today, Clay engages fully with the natural world, gracefully dredging up the mysteries embedded in modern life--paper dolls clipped from the morning news, the ringing ears of lightning-strike victims--and bringing 'the patient sadness that will outwait the memory of a spark' to life in precise swirls of language. Each poem shimmers with physical and metaphysical insight, and Clay's endless storms and seasons resonate with wisdom and music. This is a brilliant collection of poems.""--Alex Lemon ""These poems are sentient and surprising as only living things can be, intimate and compelling precisely because they don't aim to please, but to exist. In his own words, reading this book is like 'centering yourself along unrecorded boundaries' that Clay has somehow managed to discern for us and translate into poems that are in turns clear and strange, and always warmly memorable.""--Bob Hicok ""These poems hover in and out of dreams, follow the mind's wild wanderings, interrogate language, reveal the heart's ambitions, all the while remaining brilliantly anchored to the physicality of all things earthbound. This is a book that lives as much in the curious mind as it does in the undeniable weather of the real world, and Clay travels expertly between the two with a gentle, inspired grace.""--Ada Limón ""Clay locates the poetic realm at the very limit of what is known, a hotel teetering on the flat world's precipice, where every visitor is temporary. Not only does one hear Dickinson whisper, 'My Business is Circumference, ' Clay arrives also with a Whitmanesque capacity for affirmation, 'The lyrical quality of a weed.' His poems sing themselves through their own complications, searching for that beautiful order language has no part of, but only language can reveal. 'May I for a moment be nervous?' the poet asks. The answer in the poems themselves is their wondrous nerve.""--Dan Beachy-Quick ""Immediately striking about the poems in Clay's second book is their lack of self-consciousness. . . This poet locates himself at the borders between nature and language, solitude and community, the physical and metaphysical where paradox and fragmentation are at once evaded and embraced.""--Publishers Weekly"

Author Information

Adam Clay is the author of five collections of poems: Circle Back, To Make Room for the Sea, Stranger, A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World, and The Wash. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, jubilat, Georgia Review, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Literary Arts Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission, he teaches at the University of Southern Mississippi and edits Mississippi Review.

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