Acie Clark's debut collection may be titled Small Talk, but there's nothing vapid or guarded about these 61 poems. The New Southern Voices Poetry Book Prize winner plumbs the challenges facing a gay, liberal transgender man in a red state. Marked by love of nature and the lingering power of religion, his alliterative verse alternates between the portentous and the pastoral.
Each section opens with a "Small Talk" entry that, fittingly, remarks on the weather and the morning's coffee before going deeper. "Self-Portrait as Orpheus on T" connects to an ancient tradition of metamorphosis. "Transformation is not painless:/ this needle is two inches long and has to hit muscle." Weekly sound recordings track the process, which has unexpected side effects: "The dog no longer recognizes my voice." Being out in the South is risky for the speaker. In "Let's Stay Gay in Alabama," he is spat on in the street and encounters hate speech. Vexed family relationships, complicated by inherited substance abuse disorder (as addressed in a "Temperance" series), thread through as well.
Biblical allusions and premonitions create a sense of foreboding. In contrast to that weightiness are sources of balm, chiefly the support of a partner and the poet's joy in the natural world--especially birds--even during climate crisis ("the woods call to the woods with the warblers we have left"). For readers who finds themselves in flux, facing an uncertain future, this collection promises that "a poem is not an answer,/ but a question we can live in." --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck