Scorched earth

To describe her second poetry collection, following I Can't Talk about the Trees without the Blood (2018), Clark repurposes a quote from Ralph Ellison on the blues that calls the genre, "an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically." Writing on the heels of divorce, Clark channels desperation, humor, desire, and anger into themes of race, sex, and relationships. Clark's long lines, long stanzas, and long poems evidence her courage to "lean into length," a quote she attributes to poet José Olivarez, as she navigates many hyphenate states of mind--self-doubt, self-confidence, and self-acceptance. Clark reflects on stereotypical beauty standards on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air ("weave, fake nails, contacts, and eyelashes") and celebrates the "The First Black Bachelorette" as well as the speaker's own mother, "hair like braided / black licorice." Other poems interact with the striking silhouette art of Kara Walker and confront the impossible compromises made in the name of survival; "resistance isn't always about pushing / back but perhaps submitting to a field / of cotton." These are wonderfully intertextual poems bristling with bright intelligence, formal variation, and outlandishly feral longing, "There is still some residue, some proof of puncture, / some scars you graze to remember the risk."

Multi-prize-winning poet Clark (I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood) offers a second volume of poems that trace the narrator's journey from the first days of divorce (as in the poem "Proof" in which the lines "People get weird about divorce. Think it's contagious." create an overarching statement) to new love (some moments of hope are found in "The Terror of New Love": "your arms another possible / home"). These poems are breathless and wandering (or wondering?), and while often long, are keenly observant and perceptive. "If my body be a long poem / then I want it to go wherever it needs." The narrator's divorce creates a furious search for identity--as a woman, as a Black woman finding value in her blackness, as both a hetero and queer lover, as a woman coming to terms: "I become who I am by not knowing--." VERDICT Clark's poems are a journey of astonishing clarity and vision.--Karla Huston