The Clearing - (Max Ritvo Poetry Prize) by Allison Adair (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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).

Review Quotes

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 es

About the Author

Allison Adair is the author of The Clearing. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Kenyon Review Online, North American Review, and ZYZZYVA, among other journals. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors' Award, the Orlando Prize, and first place in Mid-American Review's Fineline Competition, Adair holds a MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Originally from central Pennsylvania, she lives in Boston.