Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Jeremy Michael Clark

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9781610758185
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In The Trouble with Light, Jeremy Michael Clark reflects on the legacy of familial trauma as he delves into questions about belonging, survival, knowledge, and self-discovery in unflinching lyrical poems. "Like you, " he writes, "I have... [a] history of / hardly caring for my body, of letting / whoever drink their share of me, / thinking it could cure / my fear of dirt." Whether ruminating on intimacy, lineage, identity, faith, or addiction, Clark's poems embody a restless, rigorous curiosity. Largely set in the poet's hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, his portraits of interiority gracefully juxtapose the sorrows of alienation and self-neglect with the restorative power of human connection. In one of the most affectionate—and characteristically ambivalent—poems in the collection, Clark recalls, "For days, doubt struck as does lightning / across the span of night.... Love? If it exists, / it's the uncertainty one feels before a thunderclap, / after the sky's gone dark again." A vulnerable and transporting debut, The Trouble with Light is a vital record of how grief can endure, and how we can yet endure ourselves.
 

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Memory, Flooding Back
• A Partial List of Effects
• How Does It Feel?
• Never Just One
• I Learned My Name Was Not My Name
• Some Call It Artificial
• Dear Darkness
• In the Hometown I’ve Tried to Love
• Rerun
• How Easily They Slap
• Whole Life
• *
• State of Denial
• What’s Left
• Words of Warning
• Fixing to Die
• Those That Flew
• This Waterfall Could Never Still
• And Just Like That River, I’ve Been Running
• The Men, as I Remember Them
• Last Night in Louisville
• Now You See It
• The South Got Something to Say
• Whatever Vehicle Gets You Through
• *
• One Fire, Quenched with Another
• *
• Southern Drawl
• Independence Day
• You Have to Go Away to Come Back
• Baxter, between Highland and Payne
• (I Am) My Father’s Son
• After the Crest
• Doing the Work
• There’s No Ignoring It Now
• No Angel
• Golden Hour
• *
• One Year Sober
• In the Hometown I’ve Tried to Love
• What I See When I Stare Long Enough into Nothing
• Still I Dream about Birds
• Unauthorized Autobiography
• Other, Entirely
• Home
• *
• They Bolted and Brought Him Low
• Notes