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New Southern Voices Poetry Book Prize winner Acie Clark’s debut collection asks us to lean into conversation.
Acie Clark wants to talk. In his debut collection, Clark reconsiders our relationship to talking about work and the weather. These poems tell the story of a trans man coming into a new literal and figurative voice while finding language for the world around him. In platonic love poems, interfaith self-talk, and images of the queer south, Clark calls contradictions into question and insists on the power of the conjunction and the hyphen. Small Talk works in both lyric and narrative traditions of trans poetics and spiritual writing.
From a poet Marie Howe once praised as “a stubborn inquisitive mind at work here and a resilient heart,” Small Talk introduces a unique new voice. Through lenses of recovery, birding, caregiving, gospel and semantics, this collection believes in multiplicities, in the seemingly contradicting identities that make us who we are, and that talking to each other might still save us.
“Attuned to the conversations we have with ourselves and each other, Small Talk recognizes the slipperiness of language as a means of self-discovery as well as self-deception: ‘This is the kind of story that survives best in the South, / where facts fade as the details get more real, less true.’ These poems are elemental. They gleam with a hard-won clarity, unafraid to reckon with public and personal histories as a trans man grieving a grandfather whose memory fades, negotiating a path toward sobriety, and seeking what is holy in a rural landscape keenly and movingly observed. In prose poems, prayers, and dreams, we hear a man coming into himself through birdwatching and gardening, testosterone and tarot. Reckoning with a fallible country and God, the phenomenal sonnet suite ‘Faith Hill’ concludes: ‘I do, I still have some faith.’ This poet is comfortable existing in doubt because that is where belief resides. Belief, like the body and natural world, is richer because it is ever evolving. Rebuking fixedness and inflexibility, Small Talk celebrates change with a spirit of play and generosity.” —Derrick Austin, author of This Elegance and judge of New Southern Voices Prize
“In a world hell-bent on talking loud, Acie Clark's Small Talk quietly invites us to cozy up & settle into the softened everydayness of queerness. ‘The coffee was good’ & Clark's south was queer. So goes the truth of our histories. A gracious gift, like prayer or truth whisped through the field, these poems make new friends on porches, pour us each a fresh new glass of water or call us in for dinner in new living rooms. Small Talk is both tender in its vulnerability & holds all sounds & stories in its quiet. A book of poems that tell us ‘how to live, or to live’ as we await the coming weather.” —Brody Parrish Craig, author of The Patient is an Unreliable Historian
“Acie Clark’s Small Talk is a tender, wondrous debut. Mitotic and expansive, this collection makes room for the many selves we are and have been, and calls them into the future. Clark celebrates the companions we are and need: the dog, the deer, the birds and the horse. These poems are prayers and inquiries, portals and mirrors, holy and sublime.” —Donika Kelly, author of The Natural Order of Things
Acie Clark is a multi-genre writer from Florida and Georgia. He has taught at the University of Central Arkansas, at Interlochen Center for the Arts, and at the Provincetown Public Library. He received his MFA from the University of Alabama where he worked for Black Warrior Review as the online editor and as a farmhand at Snows Bend Farm. His work has been supported by the Fine Arts Work Center, selected for Best New Poets, and anthologized in Divinity in the Margins, I Witness: An Anthology of Documentary Poetry, and The Florida Anthology. He lives in Arkansas.
I.
Small Talk
Self-Portrait as Orpheus on T
First Fiction
Let’s Stay Gay in Alabama
All the fascists who were not yet fascists stood at their windows and said we needed that
Night Moves
Prophecy
Saying yes to life
Sing into my mouth
I host a story in my heart where I was a clairvoyant child
Temperance
Seven Swans
Psalm for Fort Lauderdale
Submission
Temperance (for Acie)
Morning Comrade
Brother in Christ
Turnip Shanty
II.
Small Talk
Annual Honesty
Temperance
Files Cemetery
Il solito parole
Temperance (for Lucia)
Birthday
The One About Pee
Epithalament
I was my mother at the start of the year.
False Spring
They were starlings
Walt Whitman
See Rock City
Crystal Light, Golden Corral
Cardinals
To return to those early prayers
III.
Small Talk
Pilgrim at Tucker Creek
Epistolary Poem
The last time I saw him my father tried to kiss his daughter on my face
Nonduality
Temperance
State of Mind Bird
Watch what happens / live
If seen ying but at a distance
Absolution online
Intoning
Faith Hill
IV.
Small Talk
Meeting you there completely
Awake in Winter
All summer the foxes
Full Circle Forgiveness
Psalm as a Twin Harvest
The Liminal Point
I live in a city my granddaddy was an orphan in
Superimposition
回
I Kept Myself in the Field One Day
V.
Small Talk
Notes
Journal Acknowledgments