The Clearing: Poems

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Winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Clearing navigates the ever-shifting poles of violence and vulnerability with rich imagination and a singular incisiveness, asserting feminist viewpoints and mortal terror in lush musical lines (New York Times).

The women in Allison Adairs debut collectionluminous and electric from the first line to the lastlive in places that have been excavated for gold and precious ores. They understand the nature of being hollowed out, of being the planets stone / core as it tries to carve out one secret place and fails. And so, as these poems take us from the midst of the Civil War to our current era, they chart fairy tales that are at once unsettling and painfully familiar, never forgetting that cruelty compels us to search for tenderness. What if this time, they ask, instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have.

Adair sees the dirt beneath our nails, both alone and as a country, and pries it gently loose until we remember something of who we are, from before . . . from a similar injury or kiss. There is a dark tension in this work, and its product is wholly an alchemical feat, turning horror into beauty (Boston Globe).

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Praise for The Clearing

The poems in Adairs debut draw on folklore and the animal world to assert feminist viewpoints and mortal terror in lush musical lines, as when A fat speckled spider sharpens / in the shoe of someone you need.New York Times Book Review, New & Noteworthy Poetry

Astonishing and luminous . . . [The Clearing] is an alchemical feat, turning horror into beauty as Adair reveals what surges beneaththe violence, want, grief, thrill, and nameless fury.Boston Globe

Adair considers in her imaginative debut the intersection of human and animal life, closely examining the experience of womanhood. . . . Like Grimms fairy tales, Adairs poems are dark without being bleak, hopeless, or disturbing. Readers will find the collections lush language and provocative imagery powerfully resonant.Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Masterful . . . Juxtaposing somber images from the natural world (a runt rabbit, a strangled swan, a floor of dead birds, a landscape made of a womans hair) against seemingly more durable material like bones, chicken wire, rifles, and coins, Adairs poems take as their central subject emotional and physical violence against women, which in this collection distorts all of lifes natural processes.Literary Hub, Best New Books to Read This Summer

The opening poem in the collection feels like a fable and nightmare; a scene out of time. Well write this story again and again, // how her mouth blooms to its raw venous throatthat tunnel / of marbled wetness, beefy, muted, new pillow for our star // sapphire, our slugging prospectingand how dark birds come / after, to dress the wounds, no, to peck her sockets clean. We leave the poem a little scared, a little curious, and certainly more aware: The Clearing meditates on what is asked of women, and what is taken from them.The Millions, Must-Read Poetry: June 2020

Adair is capable of a lush lyricism whose beauty is impartial, lighting up the junk of a region, a culture, and a family, its toxic heritage of violence and violation, while haloing the uncluttered space that remains after the mess has been cleared away. Los Angeles Review of Books

Electric, brilliant with loss and searching . . . As we read, we are on a journey into the woods with strangers, and The Clearings poems capture the beauty and terror of sudden, new site-lines.Colorado Review

Its difficult to believe that The Clearing is Adairs first full collection of poems. Her once-upon-a-times are generational oral histories, from the Civil War to present day. They will endure, even as the land and these people endure, despite the violence done to it and them, despite the attempts to silence them directly or by neglect. Adair speaks for and through them, allowing their rugged, dented beauty to shine through in exceptional fashion. This assured, layered, altogether extraordinary debut collection will linger in readers minds long after the first reading.Los Angeles Review

Adairs lush writing and its underpinning themes of threat, danger, and risk, much of it inherent in the lives of women, make for a nuanced, evocative, and glittering first book.RHINO

The poems of The Clearing form an intricate, compelling whole, sensual and musical, haunted (one poem literally featuring a ghost), and committed to focusing on what is often too blurry to see . . . the difficulty of wresting forms of love from forms of violence. . . . The Clearing is a wonderful, exhilarating debut, a book for any who want to live for a while in the realm of the inarticulable.Plume

Adairs poems are set in new stone, a new poetic language for fear, danger, and escape. . . . [Adair] knows that transformation comes from reexamination and reinvention, and she empowers her readers by not only changing the story but reclaiming its protagonists.Green Mountains Review

A fiery, magnificent, urgent debut that reminds us of poetrys ability to clarify perception, create awareness, and make space for us to connect with our authentic selves as we grapple with lifes chaos. Selected by Henri Cole, this book makes room for otherworldly grace, simultaneously allowing us to see the world around us while helping us find our place in it. . . . Adairs poetry provides shelter where we can pause, ask tough questions, and interact with our mortality through poetic language, compelling imagery, and animated musicality.Split Lip Magazine

The Clearing is a book where the process of reading mimics the imagistic architecture. . . . The result is an immersive linguistic world that invites a lingering, engaged contemplation and invites repeated readings and renderings of your own experience into its pages.Dasha Bulatova, Empty Mirror

The Clearing traverses chicken-wired landscapes teeming with hunters and wolves, fields empty but for disappointment and danger. Personal trauma is recounted throughout with intimate detail and hard-won wisdom. . . . Her poems unflinchingly face scenes of violence, painful miscarriage, young motherhood, absent men. And as much as The Clearing is a confronting of loss and grief, its also a stunning work of reimagining and rebuilding.Open Books: A Poem Emporium

In Adairs stunning debut collection, the verbs are vivid; the metaphors imagistic; the topics ranging through small town secrets, parenthood and childhood, physical love, violence and tragedy. These bold poems are imbued with the grittiness of landscape, biology, geology, and anchored by the recurring motif of searching below the surface like metal detectors or mines for things like fossils and rot, yes, but also veins of gold and memories.Ben Groner, Parnassus Books

The Clearing is a lush, lyrical book about a world where women are meant to carry things to safety and men leave decisively. Out of dry farming soil come these wise, mineral-like poems about young motherhood, mining disasters, miscarriages, memory, and much more. Adairs poems are haunting and dirt caked, but there is also a tense beauty everywhere. I found The Clearing devastating.Henri Cole

What if this time instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have. So begins Allison Adairs The Clearing, the title poem leading us, tooth by tooth, line by line, into this dark forest of a book. Adairs phrases are spell-like, their ingredients mixed in surprising, potent ways: the fat matter of memory, a caterpillars sad accordion hymn, the Gregorian green singing grass. I would follow this poet wherever her mind goeseven into the deepest woods, into memories of grief and lossand I would trust her words to lead me out again. The Clearing is brilliant, gutting, completely original.Maggie Smith

Adair dives into motherhood, history, and the now to find the currentsloss, violence, yearningthat keep us afloat, that shipwreck us. Her gaze is clear-eyed, precise, and jarring: The dogs staph-eaten paw / soaking in a Cool Whip bowl and the caterpillar inches along, lost / in its sad accordion hymn. Her lyricism is astonishing and her attentiveness to sound dazzles: antlers rub against apple bark, bats drown, and music is struck from anvils. Adairs sensory-rich language doesnt reconfigure pain into beauty, though. It does something harderit forces us to contend with the light and the dark inside each of us.Eduardo Corral

Adairs poems chart the measureless ways that trauma is born of violence and loss while reminding us that tenderness and mercy are descendants of grief. Wise, rapturous, and thicketed with hair-raising imagery, this collection has women wading through landscapes teeming with wolves and real-life danger surreal enough to be remembered, rendered as fable. This effectthis devastatingly beautiful booklingers off the page. It illuminates itself in the moment and at unexpected hours. The Clearing is an extraordinary debut.Marcus Wicker

Author Bio

Allison Adair is the author of The Clearing. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Kenyon Review Online, North American Review, and ZYZZYVA, among other journals. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors Award, the Orlando Prize, and first place in Mid-American Reviews Fineline Competition, Adair holds a MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Originally from central Pennsylvania, she lives in Boston.