New Southern Voices Poetry Book Prize winner Acie Clark’s debut collection asks us to lean into conversation.
Acie Clark wants to talk. In his debut collection, Clark reconsiders our relationship to talking about work and the weather. These poems tell the story of a trans man coming into a new literal and figurative voice while finding language for the world around him. In platonic love poems, interfaith self-talk, and images of the queer south, Clark calls contradictions into question and insists on the power of the conjunction and the hyphen. Small Talk works in both lyric and narrative traditions of trans poetics and spiritual writing.
From a poet Marie Howe once praised as “a stubborn inquisitive mind at work here and a resilient heart,” Small Talk introduces a unique new voice. Through lenses of recovery, birding, caregiving, gospel and semantics, this collection believes in multiplicities, in the seemingly contradicting identities that make us who we are, and that talking to each other might still save us.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
I.
Small Talk
Self-Portrait as Orpheus on T
First Fiction
Let’s Stay Gay in Alabama
All the fascists who were not yet fascists stood at their windows and said we needed that
Night Moves
Prophecy
Saying yes to life
Sing into my mouth
I host a story in my heart where I was a clairvoyant child
Temperance
Seven Swans
Psalm for Fort Lauderdale
Submission
Temperance (for Acie)
Morning Comrade
Brother in Christ
Turnip Shanty
II.
Small Talk
Annual Honesty
Temperance
Files Cemetery
Il solito parole
Temperance (for Lucia)
Birthday
The One About Pee
Epithalament
I was my mother at the start of the year.
False Spring
They were starlings
Walt Whitman
See Rock City
Crystal Light, Golden Corral
Cardinals
To return to those early prayers
III.
Small Talk
Pilgrim at Tucker Creek
Epistolary Poem
The last time I saw him my father tried to kiss his daughter on my face
Nonduality
Temperance
State of Mind Bird
Watch what happens / live
If seen ying but at a distance
Absolution online
Intoning
Faith Hill
IV.
Small Talk
Meeting you there completely
Awake in Winter
All summer the foxes
Full Circle Forgiveness
Psalm as a Twin Harvest
The Liminal Point
I live in a city my granddaddy was an orphan in
Superimposition
回
I Kept Myself in the Field One Day
V.
Small Talk
Notes
Journal Acknowledgments
