A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World: Poems

By Adam Clay

“At the edge of the world, you’ll want to have this book. The final lines of Adam Clay’s poem, ‘Scientific Method,’ have been haunting me for weeks.” —Iowa Press-Citizen

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.”

“Poems that are in turn clear and strange, and always warmly memorable.” —Bob Hicok

“These poems engage fully the natural world . . . even as they understand the individual’s exclusion from it.” —Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• 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.

Book preview

I

You exist only in the delirious illusion of language.

–Robert Penn Warren,

Brotherhood in Pain

Natural History

What we think of as Natural History

exists quietly in the oldest elevator this side

of the Mississippi. A town built on hills —

and then, southbound.

Centering yourself along unrecorded boundaries,

it’s only when you come upon

a creek in the woods that the concept of remoteness

dawns on you

as something more than distance.

The tree is a metaphor for something, as is the creek, as is your sightline.

You value landscape for the way it is both certain and changing. You value a boat for the same reason.

How many boats are waiting here in the forest?

The lyric quality of a weed. Air’s rapture near noon.

And then noon.

And you cannot think of a prayer even if it means the difference between being saved and being damned.

Nothing here has a name.

The tree is a metaphor for something, as is the creek, as is your sightline —

I’m Pretty Sure That’s a Hurdle in the Distance

I could have run from repetition

forever. Dearest sun, your thick light

drags me down like a river current —

a big river, a small current. Anything

I say could start with repetition

and end with light. A shortcut to save

breath. Breathing. Light. Newsprint-

smudged forehead. Four-of-a-kind.

Where the hills rose up, people

grew really tired and settled. This is

easy to understand. A head filled

with vowels in a consonant world.

I’m fairly sure you could finish

my sentences and make them better.

What else did you think

a question was designed for?

Sonnet

I am trying to find a line of tenderness

to walk tonight. But wishing for something —

a deer, a possum, a squirrel, anything —

to make its way across the boulevard

at this moment would suit me fine. Do we wish

for words and then they come to us? Do we wish

for words and say the opposite of what we