How to Communicate: Poems - Softcover

Clark, John Lee

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9781324074793: How to Communicate: Poems

Synopsis

Winner of the 2023 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry
Longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry

A stunning debut from an award-winning DeafBlind poet, “How to Communicate is a masterpiece” (Kaveh Akbar).

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.

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About the Author

John Lee Clark is an award-winning writer and Protactile educator. He has received the Krause Essay Prize and a National Magazine Award for his prose. His poetry collection, How to Communicate, received the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award. A 2021–2023 Bush Fellow, he lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with his partner, the ASL Deaf artist Adrean Clark, their three kids, and two cats.

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Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9781324035343: How to Communicate: Poems

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  132403534X ISBN 13:  9781324035343
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022
Hardcover