Addresses Home by A.E. Clark

In nautical navigation, dead reckoning is the process of calculating one’s current position using a previously determined position or fix. A.E. Clark’s collection, a series of epistles and addresses, offers a lyrical accounting for landscape, language, and litany of things that fill distances between the speaker and addressee: “(Dear Someone: /Pronouns have always been worse.) / Because for you, Alphabet, as for any good Roman, there is no difference / between conquering and yielding.” In ADDRESSES HOME, the poet astutely navigates uncertainty through nomenclature— naming doubt and in doing so, finding a fix.

–Nicole Tong (Author of MY MINE)

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

In ADDRESSES HOME, A.E. Clark locates literary origin via the intimate address of the epistolary embrace. Compelled by a desire to praise the things – the nouns, sounds, fields of perception – that make up a daily life, these poignant poems equally consider what Wallace Stevens called “the nothing that is.” Airplanes fly through, pronouns slip their noose, it’s the desert, all right, and a place you call home when you have to. Yet and still, what is left is homage. A.E.Clark pays her tribute forward, all the way into gratitude.

–Claudia Keelan (Author of UTOPIC, DEVOTION FIELD, and MISSING HER)

Rating: *****  [5 of 5 Stars!]