Intense and intimate, the poems in Amy M. Clark’s splendid second collection, Roundabout, plunge us into a cherished, safe microcosm of two (a mother and a son) that is perpetually threatened, if not by school violence, then by the violence of seemingly safe streets populated by children in parkas and runners in crosswalks. The terrifying ambivalence of American life, with its combination of privilege and love underpinned by specters of fear and abuse, manifests in every page of Roundabout—all balanced by Clark’s near-miraculous craft. —Molly Peacock
The poems in Amy Clark’s Roundabout are plainspoken, intimate, and elegant—but they are also beautifully crafted and psychologically complex, meditating on the vagaries of motherhood, the difficulties of family, and the sudden imposition of violence. This is a wonderful collection, one I’ll return to with pleasure. —Kevin Prufer
This age’s frenetic pace, fractiousness, and violence (of which guns are emblematic) have ear-wormed their way into our hearts and homes, thereby keeping us on alert. In Roundabout, the tether of “clean form” allows the speaker’s eyes to rest on one subject until she can say, “I love it.” Here, depth emerges through the lenses of retrospection and circumspection. —Debra Kang Dean
Only a poet of precise, unwavering vision can create a work that somehow manages to hold, at once, the whole of life—from a glass of milk to a gun in a closet. These poems are both delicate and formidable, as are we. Find the world reflected back to you in a way that makes you see that we are connected as much by what we love as by what we fear. —Rhett Iseman Trull
Amy M. Clark’s polished and crystalline poems, with their perfected formal surfaces, are magic lenses where the truth keeps coming into focus. Humorous, sympathetic, and fiercely honest, Clark doesn’t hesitate to look at “the treasury of muck” between the stove and the cupboard, or uncover that uneasy feeling you have when someone hands you a new baby. —Maura Stanton
In the opening poem of Stray Home, Amy M. Clark calls our attention to the act of seeing and its moral implications. The rest of the collection deepens and expands our vision through Clark’s wise, sympathetic observations. To the age-old topics, she brings fresh perspective. Clark is also able to imbue our small, usually overlooked moments with unexpected grandeur. The technique here—tercets, terza rima, skillful free verse—is beyond reproach, and a quiet humor, reminiscent of Philip Larkin, is employed in service of her twin gifts, imagination and metaphor (we have a speaker who says of a neighbor, “I knew her the way the fence’s outer side/ knows its inner side. Only that it has an inner side”). This is an accomplished, deft, and important debut. —Beth Ann Fennelly
Go to “Girl with a Playbill” and read the poem, one of nineteen impeccably made sonnets in the book. Ask yourself: How often does a contemporary poem induce genuine terror? Page after page, Stray Home works this way: seduces with understated wit and formal virtue, then ‘turns’ on you. Her stringent visions — slyly rhymed; compressed in quatrains, tercets, and couplets; deployed over taut yet flexible free-verse — absorb you with the intimacy of the close-up: erotic, yes, and discomforting. Clark’s poems smart — that is, their intelligence stings.—Steven Cramer
In this third book in a series of limited-edition collaborative chapbooks by established and emerging women poets, Molly Peacock and Amy M. Clark present sixteen poems followed by a conversation about the poems, the collaboration, and the craft of poetry.