Stranger: Poems

by Adam Clay

"A heartbreakingly stunning collection dedicated to the unsung suspension of time that occurs when life suddenly goes awry." --Ada Lim�n

Stranger is a book of both great change and deep roots, of the richest elements of the earth and the instability of a darkening sky. The third collection by Adam Clay dives into a dynamic world where 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." Tracing a period of great change in his life--a move, a new job, the birth of his first child--Clay navigates the world with elegance 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." By firmly grasping on to the present, the past and the future collapse into the lived moment, allowing for an unclouded view of a way forward.

"In language that is circular, stoic, and almost Zen-like, Clay attempts to remain himself in the face of life shifting underneath him." --Publishers Weekly

"In those moments when one rearranges the furniture in a room or leaves the cast-iron skillet in the oven or contemplates an ink stain on the wall, Clay finds a space for deep inquiry." --Kazim Ali

Genres: Poetry

154 pages, ebook

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.