Stranger

“With each deliberate, rigorous, and perfect line, Stranger works itself into a heartbreakingly stunning collection dedicated to the unsung suspension of time that occurs when life suddenly goes awry. This is a masterful book of poems that beautifully uncovers the hallways, houses, seasons, and states that separate us from each other, and from ourselves. Adam Clay is a poet who gives a voice to the unimaginable deluge of similar days in the domestic life, and yet somehow manages to anchor us even more completely to this world with his brilliance.”

“If you’re the type who can’t stomach small talk, Stranger makes for terrific company. These fluid and unremitting poems counter every disaster at every corner, in ‘a place unfit for a poet / but not a place / unfit for other people / who calmly disregard / everything but winter / in a terrifying way.’ Refusing to placate or console his reader, Adam Clay proves himself one of our most challenging and brilliant poets.”

“I’ve always thought the body to be a kind of mind and in these poems, precise lyrics detailing the most ordinary times, Adam Clay seems to agree. 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. Being is thinking, these poems claim, and they stake that claim in the space between a phenomenon and a human reaching after an understanding of a world that its experience does not measure.”