Morning Comes Roaring Down the Mountain by Emily Robyn Clark

Name: Morning Comes Roaring Down the Mountain by Emily Robyn Clark
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$17.99

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979-8-89990-239-0

2025

“Where do I begin? /The page knows my shaking pen.” These intimate opening lines set the tone of Morning Comes Roaring Down the Mountain, the riveting debut collection from award-winning poet and filmmaker Emily Robyn Clark. With candor and cinematic vision, Clark writes from the caves of grief and from the longing to scale the mountain in search of beauty. This is a book shaped by loss. Clark holds her father’s hand as he slips away “in a dark dream,” only to enter a whirlwind engagement in Paris months later: an emerald ring, a city of light, a future opening before her, until everything collapses like sand. Her fiancé’s struggle with mental illness and religious trauma brings her to the edge of death with him, a second grief as sudden and shattering as the first. But the losses do not end there. Clark writes of the silences we carry when we cannot speak the truth of our hearts: the sapphic longing in “Behind Her Eyes Are Petals,” where she loses a friend she never dared confess her love to; the near-drowning of a lover in “Luna Moth”; the quiet despair of a neighbor fighting mental illness in “My Neighbor Samuel”; the emotional exile of characters framed in her Southern Gothic poems, “Maggie the Cat Fights Silence” and “Death Is a Shot in the Dark,” where Maggie and Big Daddy lament from within their disintegrating plantation home. In “Spiral Goddess,” a personified Lady Columbia cries out against the overturning of Roe v. Wade, while powerful, ancient goddesses awaken between the pages. The landscape of her poems carries us from the Western wilderness to blood-soaked Southern soil. Clark writes with lyrical precision, offering glimpses of healing and rebirth amid devastation. Her imagery is striking, a natural extension of her training as a filmmaker. The force that grounds the collection is the mountain, symbolizing the desire to reach the place “where all the beauty came from.” The mountain becomes both masculine solidity and the singular obstacles women face. It becomes what protects, what breaks, and the hope we return to. Morning Comes Roaring Down the Mountain is a fierce anthem to the resilient human spirit. While these poems will break you, they will also lift you to the mountain. “One day, waking from your strange sleep,/when morning comes roaring down the mountain,/tiger-eye gold and gleaming . . ./you’ll remember me.”

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Emily Robyn Clark is an award-winning poet and filmmaker, and the author of Morning Comes Roaring Down the Mountain (2025) and Art Triumphant (2017). Her poetry has been featured in numerous publications, including Lullwater Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and LA’s Cultural Daily. She has performed her work across the United States, including notable venues such as SoHo in Santa Barbara, The Victory Theatre Center in Burbank, and The Aspen Poets’ Society in Aspen. A creative polymath, Clark is also a fiction writer and a singer-songwriter under the stage name Emma Dream. She studied film in the MFA program at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts, and poetry and creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. A passionate feminist and advocate for human rights and social justice, she lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

PRAISE:

“You will circle back to Emily Robyn Clark’s taut poems over and over. First to be immersed in the intensity of her senses, then to wonder at the tense economy. The poems vibrate with compressed images and implications. They will provoke you with striking paradoxes of alarm and seduction, beauty and pain, death and life, and they will leave you tingling in “the siren of silence.”

–Kristin Zimet, author of Take in My Arms the Dark

“Emily Robyn Clark’s poetry is filled with stunning imagery, charged with energy and life. Her poetry speaks on a personal level, inspiring thoughts and feelings that linger in a beautiful way. She carries me into her poetic journey and connects me with her world. I see her work gradually emerging into the world, touching and inspiring lives.”

—Stephen Kalinich

“Anything not bolted down gets carried away,” Clark says early in this singular collection. She’s right. These persona poems did just that. I was carried away by the disparate voices, linked together by the poet’s singular perspective. Maggie the Cat snuggles up to Byron, who leans into a picture postcard of Utah. “You were remarkable that way with finding things that didn’t fit in/ making the whole mess work in your wild space,” Clark declares in “Last Bloom.” I hope you enjoy this “wild space” as much as I did.

–Alexis Rhone Fancher author of TRIGGERED, BRAZEN

Emily Robyn Clark‘s words touch my soul. I will be reading Morning Comes Roaring Down the Mountain often when I need to refresh my spirit. Emily will challenge you, and break your heart. You will want to put Emily’s book in your library.

–Thomas R. Thomas, author of Missing Shaun

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