Drumroll please… This is a big day for books and writers and readers — this year’s crop of National Book Award finalists is here! Past winners, now considered modern classics of American literature, include Jacqueline Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming), Jesmyn Ward (twice, for Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing), Charles Yu (Interior Chinatown), Elizabeth […]
Formally restless and relentlessly instructive, How to Communicate is a dynamic journey through language, community, and the unfolding of an identity. Poet John Lee Clark pivots from inventive forms inspired by the Braille slate to sensuous prose poems to incisive erasures that find new narratives in nineteenth-century poetry. Calling out the limitations of the literary canon, Clark includes pathbreaking translations from American Sign Language and Protactile, a language built on touch.
How to Communicate embraces new linguistic possibilities that emanate from Clark’s unique perspective and his connection to an expanding, inclusive activist community. Amid the astonishing task of constructing a new canon, the poet reveals a radically commonplace life. He explores grief and the vagaries of family, celebrates the small delights of knitting and visiting a museum, and, once, encounters a ghost in a gas station. Counteracting the assumptions of the sighted and hearing world with humor and grace, Clark finds beauty in the revelations of communicating through touch: “All things living and dead cry out to me / when I touch them.”
A rare work of transformation and necessary discovery, How to Communicate is a brilliant debut that insists on the power of poetry.
Formally restless and relentlessly instructive, How to Communicate is a dynamic journey through language, community, and the unfolding of an identity. Poet John Lee Clark pivots from inventive forms inspired by the Braille slate to sensuous prose poems to incisive erasures that find new narratives in nineteenth-century poetry. Calling out the limitations of the literary canon, Clark includes pathbreaking translations from American Sign Language and Protactile, a language built on touch.
How to Communicate embraces new linguistic possibilities that emanate from Clark’s unique perspective and his connection to an expanding, inclusive activist community. Amid the astonishing task of constructing a new canon, the poet reveals a radically commonplace life. He explores grief and the vagaries of family, celebrates the small delights of knitting and visiting a museum, and, once, encounters a ghost in a gas station. Counteracting the assumptions of the sighted and hearing world with humor and grace, Clark finds beauty in the revelations of communicating through touch: “All things living and dead cry out to me / when I touch them.”
A rare work of transformation and necessary discovery, How to Communicate is a brilliant debut that insists on the power of poetry.
How to Communicate
112How to Communicate
112Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781324074793 |
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Publisher: | Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. |
Publication date: | 10/17/2023 |
Pages: | 112 |
Sales rank: | 390,991 |
Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.40(d) |