The Clearing: Poems

by Allison Adair Narrated by Allison Adair

Overview

Winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Clearing navigates the ever-shifting poles of violence and vulnerability with rich imagination and a singular incisiveness, “asserting feminist viewpoints and mortal terror in lush musical lines” (New York Times).

The women in Allison Adair's debut collection-luminous and electric from the first line to the last-live in places that have been excavated for gold and precious ores. They understand the nature of being hollowed out, of being “the planet's stone / core as it tries to carve out one secret place and fails.” And so, as these poems take us from the midst of the Civil War to our current era, they chart fairy tales that are at once unsettling and painfully familiar, never forgetting that cruelty compels us to search for tenderness. “What if this time,” they ask, “instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have.”

Adair sees the dirt beneath our nails, both alone and as a country, and pries it gently loose until we remember something of who we are, “from before . . . from a similar injury or kiss.” There is a dark tension in this work, and its product is wholly “an alchemical feat, turning horror into beauty” (Boston Globe).

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 06/15/2020

Adair considers in her imaginative debut the intersection of human and animal life, closely examining the experience of womanhood. The nonhuman subjects of the poems are often vaguely menacing, though presented in a way that inspires awe rather than fear. There is, for instance, the unforgettable image of “the earwig/ who, for the third day now, waits in your phone’s receiver,/ pincers sharpening on the stone of their own mercy.” Elsewhere, another insect fantasizes about a recently visited flower: “the wasp who shutters the hive of its compound eyes just to live there, again, in that bloomy velvet.” Adair’s musical language and vivid imagery begs to be read aloud: “this year the scrawny splinters of winter refuse spring’s reckless flesh.” The complexities (and indignities) of being a wife, mother, and person are analyzed in poems like “As I Near Forty I Think of You Then,” in which the speaker views her own mother with greater empathy: “Years my father spent/ quoting the Bible as you swept and stewed, saved,/ let out hems. While we kicked and bickered/ your thirties away.” Like Grimms’ fairy tales, Adair’s poems are dark without being bleak, hopeless, or disturbing. Readers will find the collection’s lush language and provocative imagery powerfully resonant. (June)

From the Publisher

Praise for The Clearing

“The poems in Adair’s debut draw on folklore and the animal world to assert feminist viewpoints and mortal terror in lush musical lines, as when ‘A fat speckled spider sharpens / in the shoe of someone you need.’”—New York Times Book Review, “New & Noteworthy Poetry”

“Astonishing and luminous . . . [The Clearing] is an alchemical feat, turning horror into beauty as Adair reveals what surges beneath—the violence, want, grief, thrill, and nameless fury.”—Boston Globe

“Adair considers in her imaginative debut the intersection of human and animal life, closely examining the experience of womanhood. . . . Like Grimms’ fairy tales, Adair’s poems are dark without being bleak, hopeless, or disturbing. Readers will find the collection’s lush language and provocative imagery powerfully resonant.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Masterful . . . Juxtaposing somber images from the natural world (a runt rabbit, a strangled swan, a floor of dead birds, a landscape made of a woman’s hair) against seemingly more durable material like bones, chicken wire, rifles, and coins, Adair’s poems take as their central subject emotional and physical violence against women, which in this collection distorts all of life’s natural processes.”—Literary Hub, “Best New Books to Read This Summer”

“The opening poem in the collection feels like a fable and nightmare; a scene out of time. ‘We’ll write this story again and again, // how her mouth blooms to its raw venous throat—that tunnel / of marbled wetness, beefy, muted, new pillow for our star // sapphire, our slugging prospecting—and how dark birds come / after, to dress the wounds, no, to peck her sockets clean.’ We leave the poem a little scared, a little curious, and certainly more aware: The Clearing meditates on what is asked of women, and what is taken from them.”—The Millions, “Must-Read Poetry: June 2020”

“Adair is capable of a lush lyricism whose beauty is impartial, lighting up the junk of a region, a culture, and a family, its toxic heritage of violence and violation, while haloing the uncluttered space that remains after the mess has been cleared away.”— Los Angeles Review of Books

“Electric, brilliant with loss and searching . . . As we read, we are on a journey into the woods with strangers, and The Clearing’s poems capture the beauty and terror of sudden, new site-lines.”—Colorado Review

“It’s difficult to believe that The Clearing is Adair’s first full collection of poems. Her once-upon-a-times are generational oral histories, from the Civil War to present day. They will endure, even as the land and these people endure, despite the violence done to it and them, despite the attempts to silence them directly or by neglect. Adair speaks for and through them, allowing their rugged, dented beauty to shine through in exceptional fashion. This assured, layered, altogether extraordinary debut collection will linger in readers’ minds long after the first reading.”—Los Angeles Review

“Adair’s lush writing and its underpinning themes of threat, danger, and risk, much of it inherent in the lives of women, make for a nuanced, evocative, and glittering first book.”—RHINO

“The poems of The Clearing form an intricate, compelling whole, sensual and musical, haunted (one poem literally featuring a ghost), and committed to focusing on what is often too blurry to see . . . the difficulty of wresting forms of love from forms of violence. . . . The Clearing is a wonderful, exhilarating debut, a book for any who want to live for a while in the realm of the inarticulable.”—Plume

“Adair’s poems are set in new stone, a new poetic language for fear, danger, and escape. . . . [Adair] knows that transformation comes from reexamination and reinvention, and she empowers her readers by not only changing the story but reclaiming its protagonists.”—Green Mountains Review

“A fiery, magnificent, urgent debut that reminds us of poetry’s ability to clarify perception, create awareness, and make space for us to connect with our authentic selves as we grapple with life’s chaos. Selected by Henri Cole, this book makes room for otherworldly grace, simultaneously allowing us to see the world around us while helping us find our place in it. . . . Adair’s poetry provides shelter where we can pause, ask tough questions, and interact with our mortality through poetic language, compelling imagery, and animated musicality.”—Split Lip Magazine

“The Clearing is a book where the process of reading mimics the imagistic architecture. . . . The result is an immersive linguistic world that invites a lingering, engaged contemplation and invites repeated readings and renderings of your own experience into its pages.”—Dasha Bulatova, Empty Mirror

“The Clearing traverses chicken-wired landscapes teeming with hunters and wolves, fields empty but for disappointment and danger. Personal trauma is recounted throughout with intimate detail and hard-won wisdom. . . . Her poems unflinchingly face scenes of violence, painful miscarriage, young motherhood, absent men. And as much as The Clearing is a confronting of loss and grief, it’s also a stunning work of reimagining and rebuilding.”—Open Books: A Poem Emporium

“In Adair’s stunning debut collection, the verbs are vivid; the metaphors imagistic; the topics ranging through small town secrets, parenthood and childhood, physical love, violence and tragedy. These bold poems are imbued with the grittiness of landscape, biology, geology, and anchored by the recurring motif of searching below the surface like metal detectors or mines for things like fossils and rot, yes, but also veins of gold and memories.”—Ben Groner, Parnassus Books

“The Clearing is a lush, lyrical book about a world where women are meant to carry things to safety and men leave decisively. Out of dry farming soil come these wise, mineral-like poems about young motherhood, mining disasters, miscarriages, memory, and much more. Adair’s poems are haunting and dirt caked, but there is also a tense beauty everywhere. I found The Clearing devastating.”—Henri Cole

“‘What if this time instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have.’ So begins Allison Adair’s The Clearing, the title poem leading us, tooth by tooth, line by line, into this dark forest of a book. Adair’s phrases are spell-like, their ingredients mixed in surprising, potent ways: ‘the fat matter of memory,’ a caterpillar’s ‘sad accordion hymn,’ the ‘Gregorian green singing grass.’ I would follow this poet wherever her mind goes—even into the deepest woods, into memories of grief and loss—and I would trust her words to lead me out again. The Clearing is brilliant, gutting, completely original.”—Maggie Smith

“Adair dives into motherhood, history, and the now to find the currents—loss, violence, yearning—that keep us afloat, that shipwreck us. Her gaze is clear-eyed, precise, and jarring: ‘The dog’s staph-eaten paw / soaking in a Cool Whip bowl’ and ‘the caterpillar inches along, lost / in its sad accordion hymn.’ Her lyricism is astonishing and her attentiveness to sound dazzles: antlers rub against apple bark, bats drown, and music is struck from anvils. Adair’s sensory-rich language doesn’t reconfigure pain into beauty, though. It does something harder—it forces us to contend with the light and the dark inside each of us.”—Eduardo Corral

“Adair’s poems chart the measureless ways that trauma is born of violence and loss while reminding us that tenderness and mercy are descendants of grief. Wise, rapturous, and thicketed with hair-raising imagery, this collection has women wading through landscapes teeming with wolves and real-life danger surreal enough to be remembered, rendered as fable. This effect—this devastatingly beautiful book—lingers off the page. It illuminates itself in the moment and at unexpected hours. The Clearing is an extraordinary debut.”—Marcus Wicker

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177990552
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	03/28/2023
Series:	Max Ritvo Poetry Prize
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Angelus

Little mud shadow, hidden root,
only some of us know you were here, ever a motion at all, a wave before an arm, a seed just splitting for the sprout. You lay coiled a comma, a question, the soft green berry of a potato that won’t come true. I was a yellow stamen, then a wheelbarrow full of empty sacks instead of the ground you needed. You died of thirst beneath the mass of a basket. The painter understood how to obscure and why a prayer would be offered to the brown earth and not to the ringing of a brown sky. Dangers were everywhere:
a spire on the hill, pitchfork digging for throb or pulse, we were never safe. We were never we, until Salvador, the man who bent time—
himself a closed eye, like you just a part, a body’s outline and no more—
saw the surface wrinkle with ants coming forward to feed. You were their small picnic, buried under a layer of reeds by hands folded in hope, or by the dark clutch of a fresh-tilled hunger.

Silverton

It doesn’t matter who answers the phone, it’s the same forecast:
snow following snow,
road closed followed by Jessie returning to John, wrist healed and you can hardly tell anything went wrong, until she waves hello.
Or is it goodbye. You know, this much cold, this high, batters the eye until all it sees is warmth. The girls lining up crayons before dinner.
Coals orange as a daffodil’s trumpet.
So easy to forget tomorrow’s ash.
In a ghost town, bowls of thin soup steam on every edge. Nothing can hurt us. The pioneers. We forget why we came—but look at that mountain.
Was anything ever so new?

What We Should Really Be Afraid Of
I
Not snow.
Not a single flake and not all of them at once.
Not their nest, their melting puzzle, their instinct to insulate against heat.

Not the storm, even hard, not when wind discovers rain let its cool mouth linger on the spine of a high mountain.
Not the mountain.
Not the smooth mud that reassures its slope:
it’s not your fault.

Not the thin white trees, leaning into weather
(they know what’s coming):
portents, gray steam created and dissolved like an apology dripping down a bathroom mirror.
Not the writer’s hand wiped on a leg.

Not spring, not another, not its vining pleated limbs swollen with the ink of a decomposing violet. Not the wasp who shutters the hive of its compound eyes just to live there, again, in that bloomy velvet—
reckless, forgiving, drunk with altitude.

Not the wasp’s slender waist.

II
Water in the stream below buzzes with struggle – a woman’s hair tangled in an anchor.
The thousand grasping hands of its rust remind us: Pray that it holds.

There are things to fear.
You know it.
The water knows, too, the mountain,
the snow, even before it falls.
Boats, floating for a time,
wait for the sound of their narrow ribs to crack. A fat speckled spider sharpens in the shoe of someone you need. Bacon grease naps in secret cells.

III
A woman’s thumbs fumble a button.
Her organs shimmy at the wrong time, she tells herself it’s music. Someone else pulls a brush through her daughter’s hair.
She decides she won’t hear the steps in the hall, the key turning in the lock.

He does it because he loves us.
You do it because you have to.
You do it because he told you.
We do it because we’re told to.
In an attic, a man steps on something soft and tells himself the whole floor was covered with dead birds, so how could he not?
But there was only one bird, lying just where the man stepped. He knows.
Through his shoe,
he felt the long bones of the wing give.

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