Above the Fall Line by Clara Silverstein

Clara Silverstein is a wise, sophisticated writer, no matter the genre. From the opening poem “Tourists in My Hometown,” onward, she offers fresh ways of seeing, finding the extraordinary and complex in what at first might seem direct and straightforward. That is her gift, to use her sharp clarity of observation to explore the nuanced world of emotions. Throughout this finely wrought collection, she acknowledges and reflects on history—her own, her family’s, and our country’s. She has the eye of a photographer who can see behind the poses, and she knows that in order to go forward, we must go back. Like the best writers, she is always noticing, her words pounded in like nails as she builds a true present out of the rough scraps of the past, confronting racial, sexual, and social injustices. Among the many losses here, there are also multiple awakenings to the truth.

–Jim Daniels, author of Gun/Shy and The Luck of the Fall

The poems in Clara Silverstein’s Above the Fall Line move like a river through a woman’s life. With its headwaters in the south—Richmond, Virginia, where the poet portrays a childhood still haunted by the Civil War and marked by desegregation and busing—it carries us all the way to Boston, where she confronts the challenges of adult life while never losing sight of where she came from. Has a poet ever rendered adolescence so palpably or the unexpected loss of a parent with such heart-rending candor? Reading these poems brought the past—my own and that of an entire generation—roaring back.

–Sue Ellen Thompson, author of Sea Nettles: New & Selected Poems and winner of the Maryland Author Award

Above the Fall Line is part nostos and part origin story. Elegiac, pressing hard on U.S. and personal history, these poems engage threats from within and without; they reckon with the experience of desegregation in a southern city, with a father’s early death, and with the cost of what’s been lost. What sort of phoenix, the book asks, can emerge from the “pall of smoke and rubble” of a fallen Richmond, of a fraught childhood? Clara Silverstein’s first collection of poetry “scuff[s] the dirt of heritage,” “scanning the measures / until time starts again.”

–John Hoppenthaler, author of Night Wing over Metropolitan Area and Domestic Garden.