Small Talk

by Acie Clark

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.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published September 22, 2026

Reviews

[Philip Kenner]

Thank you to Hub City for the ARC!

Acie Clark renders his poems with patience, distance, and wise sense of humor. The events of these poems live in a present-tense tumbling forward and backward and in on themselves. Time and sense-of-self are recurring bedfellows; we can only know ourselves in time, but it is time which makes us stranger to ourselves. These poems are about becoming oneself while allowing for change, air, water, memory, grief, and sobriety to show us corners of life we would otherwise leave dusty and covered in shadows.

“I was my mother at the start of the year” is perhaps my favorite, but “Birthday” and “State of Mind Bird” are close seconds. “I Kept Myself in the Field One Days” is one of those poems that’s so damn good and tender and funny that I wish I wrote it, which is a kind of generous/productive jealousy I know means I’ve just found an all-time favorite poetry collection.

Run, do not walk, to this incredible debut from a queer poet who embraces and edifies what it means to be from the south, what it means to be in life through a body, what it means to come from someone, from somewhere, and to let that be a window into the rest of your life.

[BPC]

In a world hell-bent on talking loud, Acie Clark's Small Talk quietly invites us to cozy up & settle in to the softened everydayness of queerness. "The coffee was good" & Clark's south was queer. So goes the truth of our histories.

While poems like "Let's Stay Gay in Alabama" never look away from the complexity of Clark's homeland, he always carefully resurfaces us in the quiet trust of spaces & truths we never had to earn. A gracious gift, like prayer or truth whisped through the field, these poems make new friends on porches, pour us each a fresh new glass of water or call us in for dinner in new living rooms. Small Talk is both tender in its vulnerability & holds all sounds & stories in its quiet. A book of poems that tell us "how to live, or to live" as we await the coming weather.

[Dol Leander]

There is a lot to be said about southern faith as a queer person, something hard to describe about this life unless you’ve lived it. And Acie Clark has certainly lived it. The grief of becoming yourself and the contradictory joy of having to re-contextualize your relationship to the every day is reflected on the surface of an algae-covered pond in these pages. And you are taken through all of it, what it means to come from someone and change into someone else and what happens to all the love in your body when it inevitably transpires. Reading this is being asked to stand vulnerable, baby teeth clutched in hand, and know to live.

[Kas Armstrong]

Everyone needs to read this right now. Utterly and infinitesimally intimate. Life changing.