Full Description
An aching meditation on the cyclical nature of grief and memory's limited capacity to preserve everything time takes from us.
How does one make sense of loss—personal and collective? When language and memory are at capacity, where do we turn? Confronted with "a year meant to end all / those to come," acclaimed poet Adam Clay questions whether anything is "wide enough to contain what's left / of hope." In the absence of a clear way forward, the poems of Circle Back wander grief's strange and winding path. Along the way, the line between reality and dreams blurs: cows stare with otherworldly eyes, 78s play under cactus needles, a father becomes his own child, and the dead become something more complicated—a "sketch turned to painting / left in a room dusty from / lack of passing through."
But amidst these liminal landscapes, a "thread of promise" persists in poetry. As flawed as language is, we still turn to it for longevity, for love, like "Keats, / sketching himself back into place." Vulnerable and nuanced, Clay details the difficult work of healing—and in doing so, captures those needful moments of reprieve in grief's "strange circle." Two friends dashing through a sprinkler. A garden of startled birds. Out for a run some gray morning: a sudden patch of wildflowers. Circle Back is a bared heart, one readers will find as thoughtful as it is tender.
Contents
What Forks Will Splinter Probability 1
1.
Black-Capped Chickadee: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack 11 Some Mood 12
Shared Custody 13
Poem for a Pandemic 14
Aesthetic 15
Elegy for a Town Built by Trains 16
Where Paradise Lay 17
Best Wishes 18
Two Sides of the Same Coin 19
Strange Belonging 20
The Great Indifference 21
Ecocriticism 22
After Listening to a Podcast About Nuclear Tactical Weapons,
I Go Outside to Take In the Sunrise 23
A Year of Dreams Without Birds 24
Finishing Another Book About the World Coming to an End 25 The Bar in Fayetteville Where All the Moms Now Drink 26
2.
Framed by the Screen 29
Darkling I Listen 30
Adam Clay 32
Mixtape Archive Circa 1997 33
Iowa Workshop Model 34
Imposter Syndrome While Isolating at Home 35 False Start 36
On Pestilence 37
The Cemetery Where My Grandparents Are Buried 38 Diagnostic Mess 39
On the Day When No One Was Born 40
Grief in a Time of Warming 41
Certain 42
You Can't Be Against Forever 43 Eternal Things 44
3.
Structures of Living 49
Strange Animal Facts 50
Polaroid Elegy 51
Historically Windy Locations 52 Eventually One Point Where We Arrive 53 Facing the Wrong Way 54
Blessedness Is Ours 55 Collegiality Statement 56 Some Internal Aura 57 Figures into Darkness 58 You're Not a Bee 59
In Place of a Nap 60
In a Silent Way 61 Self-Portrait at Forty-One 63 Settlement 64
What I Pray For 65
Acknowledgments 67
