REVIEWS OF THE CLEARING

Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“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.”

Boston Globe, “Alchemical Lyrics”

From Nina MacLaughlin: “Boston-based poet Allison Adair’s astonishing and luminous debut collection, The Clearing (Milkweed), out this week, and winner of the Max Ritvo Prize, throbs with the secrets that live behind the folktales.”

Lit Hub, “Best New Books to Read This Summer”

From Aaron Robertson: “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.” 

Los Angeles Review

From Mandana Chaffa: “Whether Adair is focusing on the complexity of relationships or the expansiveness of our natural world, there’s a timeless depth and rooting in these explorations. Her vision is kaleidoscopic, in the way she manipulates phrases and images, remaking them into dazzling new impressions.” 

Colorado Review

From Kyle Torke: “Electric, brilliant with loss and searching[…], the poems express the fuse-like warning of time: how what we get is not what we expect, that we may feel or see consequences only vaguely in the turmoil of a moment, and that history is always beneath us either in memory or literally.”

Plume

From Chelsea Wagenaar: “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.”

Sugar House Review

From Natalie Homer: “The Clearing is a book of prospecting, of gleaning. Through the wisdom and emotional intelligence of these poems, the reader emerges with coal in one hand and gold in the other.”

RELATED ESSAYS & INTERVIEWS

Milkweed, “Voice in a Time of Distance”

Reading of “After the Police Have Been Called” and “Crown Cinquain for a Lost Child, Eight Years Later” and interview for National Poetry Month. Also features poets Adam Clay, Kathryn Cowles, Brooke Matson, and Patricia Kirkpatrick.

Lit Hub, “The Spiritual Mysteries Beneath Our Feet”

Essay about things underground: “I, and my poems, have a tendency to look down, to read the ground for what it holds, what’s been buried or sown, abandoned, compressed into coal, brined then spat out as silver, mined, fracked, pushed down or painted over.”

Milkweed, “Deep Cuts” Interview

Interview about The Clearing with Bailey Hutchinson: “Melancholy and loss, fragility, decay, these are hard to avoid when you look closely at green things. But I don’t think they’re anything to fear. To me, they deepen an experience, rather than sinking it. […] You love harder, not less.”

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