Every Day, They Became Part of Him by Clark A. Pomerleau

In Clark Pomerleau’s debut book of poems, Every Day, They Became Part of Him, we find a sustained exploration of the relation between identity and history, be it personal, cultural, or ecological, and what is at stake when this relation becomes troubled by cruelty, dementia, and neglect.  Here, the summons to love finds itself confronted repeatedly with forces of erasure.  As the poet states, “sex obsessed men examined leaves to/ deflower us, de-story us, cut us down to pathologies.”  But the stories live on, imbued with memorial affections.  In poems unabashed in their discursive clarity, we find ourself in the presence of a writer whose first inclination is testimony leveraged toward the pursuit of wisdom.  A high calling indeed.

–Bruce Bond, Patmos (Juniper Prize for Poetry, U of MA)

It is not so much that this is a book of poems about nature and bodies and transformation, as it is that this book refuses any separation in our understanding of human (which is to say the exquisitely queer, the genderqueer, and the ailing) and natural worlds. Through form and content, Clark A. Pomerleau has braided (indeed, he even invented a new form) it all in this simultaneously exuberant, nostalgic, and grief-laden book. Pomerleau has written a tenderqueer echo of Wendell Berry, in the lineage of Walt Whitman. We are lucky readers who get to witness his flesh out, spin toward joy.

—TC Tolbert, author of Gephyromania and co-editor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics

Clark evokes the ecology of the Spokane region – its rocks, rivers, trees, and wildlife – as characters to engage with in these poems. You will encounter love, loss, and identity along with coyotes, cormorants, basalt cliffs, and disagreements about turkeys. These poems truly show that we are a part of nature, and that these landscapes are for us all to explore oneself and one’s world.

–Adam Gebauer, Public Lands Program Director, The Lands Council. landscouncil.org