A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World: Poems

By Adam Clay

The distilled, haunting, and subtly complex poems in Adam Clay’s A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World often arrive at that moment when solitude slips into separation, when a person suddenly realizes he can barely see the place he set out from however long ago. He now sees he must find his connection back to the present, socially entangled world in which he lives. For Clay, reverie can be a siren’s song, luring him to that space in which prisoners will begin to interrogate themselves.”

Clay pays attention to the poet’s return to the world of his daily life, tracking the subtly shifting tenors of thought that occur as the landscape around him changes. Clay is fully aware of the difficulties of Thoreau’s border life,” and his poems live somewhere between those of James Wright and John Ashbery: they seek wholeness, all the while acknowledging that a fragment is as complete as thought can be.” In the end, what we encounter most in these poems is a generous gentleness--an attention to the world so careful it’s as if the mind is washing each grain of sand.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Release date: Apr 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781571318602

Adam Clay

Adam Clay is the author of five collections of poems: Circle Back, To Make Room for the Sea, Stranger, A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World, and The Wash. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, jubilat, Georgia Review, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Literary Arts Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission, he teaches at the University of Southern Mississippi and edits Mississippi Review.