Stranger: Poems

by Adam Clay

“Heartbreakingly stunning.” —ADA LIMÓN Elegant and contemplative, Adam Clay’s third collection of poems explores what it means for our lives to change—dwelling on the moments decisions are made, and the repercussions we grow with afterward. A move. A new job. The birth of a child. In these intimate, bewildering developments—as familiar as the houses and ever-changing as the lakes and rivers that populate these poems—Clay finds that the only map available is “not of the world / but of the path I took to arrive in this place / a map with no real definable future purpose.” Yet in these changes Clay reveals joy and wonder, staring into the heart of transition and finding in it the wisdom that “Despite our best efforts to will it shut / the proof of the world’s existence / can best be seen in its insistence / in its opening up.” Deeply rooted in beauties both domestic and wild—capturing the richest elements of the earth and the instability of a shifting sky— Stranger collapses the past and the future into the lived moment, allowing for an unclouded view of a way forward.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published February 9, 2016

About the author

Adam Clay's most recent book is Circle Back (Milkweed Editions, 2024). His poems have appeared in Tin House, jubilat, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Louisiana State University and edits AUTOCORRECT, a journal of poetry and poetics.

Reviews

[Matt McBride · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stranger is the sound your thoughts make while moving over the surface of your experience in the world. In Stranger, words are "a curtain meant to protect nothing." Clay's poems are in dialogue with a larger order entirely indifferent to us or our comprehension of it. Or, as he states, "necessity never needed us." Clay enacts the effort of thought sending out filaments in the hopes to catch onto moments, via comprehension or memory, only to find those moments or memories dissolving into other moments or memories.

[Kevin Mckinney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll have to read this again sometime to put some better thoughts down but this was really good. The language here is beautiful and dense-- a lot to process. Sometimes I don't know if I felt much or "got" much in the moment I read these poems, but I'd find myself thinking about them hours later mopping the bathrooms at work or cooking dinner at home and when I'd go back to re-read after, they'd make more sense. IDK though, I think I've maybe gotten worse at reading poetry since leaving college which kinda sux

[Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclosure: Received a copy of this book via a Goodreads giveaway.

A fine collection of poems. Clay examines his world and language deftly. While there's obviously so much to unpack from the longer pieces, I found myself drawn to the more tightly contained poems, and moments within the longer poems, in which the imagery has more time to breathe, isn't swallowed up as quickly by what comes next. Which maybe is a failure on my part, as a reader; I don't know. These will need, and deserve, repeated reading.

Highlights: "Northern Lights," "Along the Edge of a Season," "Home as a Haunt," "Upper Peninsula," "Occupied Elsewhere," "East Jackson Drive," "The Cradle of All There Is," "For the First Fog of October," "First Winter In Kentucky," "This Pastoral Way Of Living," "Forecast And Its Failure."

[Robert G. Elekes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intimate, melancholic, almost pantheistic poetical phenomenology of personal life and the nature that surrounds it.