A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World: Poems

(Paperback)

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Description

The haunting and crystalline poems in Adam ClaysA Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the Worldexamine the moment when solitude slips into separation, when a person realizes he can barely see the place he set out from, and must make his way back to the present.

Imagining the return to daily life as a negotiation between an inner world and the natural one, this collection tracks the subtly shifting tenors of thought that occur as the landscape around the speaker changes. In this journey, reverie can be a sirens song, and Thoreaus border life between civilization and wildness is realized in all its possibilities and difficulties. The resulting poems live somewhere between those of James Wright and John Ashbery: they seek wholeness even as they acknowledge that a fragment is as complete as thought can be.

Thoughtful and subtly complex,A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the Worldis a collection filled with a generous gentlenessan attention to the world so careful its as if the mind is washing each grain of sand.

Reviews

"Clay writes in the language of dreams...Adam Clay is a fresh voice full of promise and A Hotel Lobby At The Edge Of The World is definitely worth a read." --Gabino Iglesias, Black Heart Magazine "At the edge of the world, you'll want to have this book. The final lines of Adam Clay's poem, 'Scientific Method,' have been haunting me for weeks ... Few people could write a better poetic line than Adam Clay does." --Jeff Charis-Carlson, Iowa Press-Citizen

Author Bio

Adam Clay is the author of The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006) and three chapbooks. His work has been published in A Public Space, Gulf Coast, and The Iowa Review. He co-edits Typo Magazine, curates the Poets in Print Reading Series at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center, and teaches at Western Michigan University. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.