A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World

“A remarkable exploration of the smallest human mysteries. These poems hover in and out of dreams, follow the mind’s wild wanderings, interrogate language, reveal the heart’s ambitions, all the while remaining brilliantly anchored to the physicality of all things earthbound. This is a book that lives as much in the curious mind as it does in the undeniable weather of the real world, and Adam Clay travels expertly between the two with a gentle, inspired grace.”

“What I love about these poems is that they are free of self-consciousness, sentient and surprising as only living things can be, intimate and compelling precisely because they don’t aim to please but to exist. In his own words, reading this book is like ‘centering yourself along unrecorded boundaries’ that Adam Clay has somehow managed to discern for us and translate into poems that are in turns clear and strange, and always warmly memorable.”

“One of the best young American poets writing today, Adam Clay engages fully with the natural world: plumbing the rivers and climbing the trees of our daily life in his superb lyrical poems. He brings ‘the patient sadness that will outwait the memory of a spark’ to life in precise swirls of language. Each poem shimmers with physical and metaphysical insight, and Clay’s endless storms and seasons resonate with wisdom and music. This is a brilliant collection of poems.”

“Adam Clay locates the poetic realm at the very limit of what is known, a hotel teetering on the flat world’s precipice, where every visitor is temporary. These poems sing themselves through their own complications, searching for that beautiful order language has no part of, but only language can reveal. Poetic quest evolves into the responsibility of poetic question. ‘May I for a moment be nervous,’ the poet asks. The answer in the poems themselves is their wondrous nerve.”