Observable Readings
Amy Clark and Katy Gordon Share Their Unassuming, Uncommon Poetry at Observable Readings March 7
Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 07:13 PM
The title of Amy Clark's first book of poetry, Stray Home, suggests both a temporary dwelling for a lost, unattached creature, and the act of a creature journeying toward permanent shelter. We can expect Clark to tell us two or more things in the same breath, and so much about love, grief, and hope, for that matter, in two simple words. She unzips rueful lifetimes from sonnets like "First Thing This Morning" and plumbs a bottomless loss in the villanelle "The Lafayette Square Holiday Mansion." Employing predictable forms and exploring such familiar subjects as father and daughter, a dying pet dog, or a soured romance, Clark is anything but predictable or familiar. Her poems shatter glass without histrionics. They make us suspect that our own visions may be self-delusions. Yet compassion and gentleness brim in her work; strays deserve no worse.
Stray Home (University of North Texas Press, 2010) won the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry in 2009. "Clark is...able to imbue our small, usually overlooked moments with unexpected grandeur," writes poet Beth Ann Fennelly, the judge of that contest. "This is an accomplished, deft, and important debut." Clark's poems and short fiction also have appeared in such journals as The Cincinnati Review, Cream City Review, The Seattle Review, Southern Poetry Review, Sou'wester, and 32 Poems.
A native of San Luis Obispo, California, Clark received an MFA in creating writing from Spalding University. She works as a freelance editor and lives in Concord, MA, with the poet Jonathan Weinert and their son Jonah. To read samples of her work, click here.
Charming and discreetly intellectual, Katy Gordon's poems demonstrate an enviable ability to make any subject come alive. They portray the natural
world, the city, and even us silly humans with refreshing wit, clarity, and extraordinary depth. Evident in every poem are an engaged mind--polymathic in its range of knowledge--and an unassuming speaker with both an accessible and delightfully unusual way of speaking. It's no wonder that Gordon also wrote a lengthy glossary of Scots for her anthology Voices From Their Ain Countrie: The Poems of Marion Angus and Violet Jacob (2006), the first scholarly edition of selected poems by the two writers. The glossary, much like Gordon's poetry, twinkles with rare and splendid words.
Her creative and academic writings have been published both in the UK and US. In 2010, she won the Barbara Ann Kachur Memorial Writing Award for poetry at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and, for the second time in three years, the Metro Arts in Transit Poetry in Motion prize.
After living abroad for many years, Gordon now resides in her hometown of St. Louis. She received her Ph.D. in Scottish Literature from the University of Glasgow and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is an Associate Professor of English at St. Louis Community College, where she has taught for the past ten years. To read her poems "Scottish Rain Song" and "Watching Trains With You," selected by Arts in Transit's Poetry in Motion Contest, click here. And/or ride Metro!