Praise for Lines the Quarry
Clarke writes with a raw and frenetic command of her facts, suggesting a scraped-together life in the unforgiving economic climate of the modern day. The book is particularly powerful when it toggles between the family narrative and the horrors of the American corporate machine.
Clarke’s poetry is a hybrid of narrative and experimental traditions, and Quarry offers a heart eclipsed partly in shadow, so we can both touch/know/trace the story and also wonder/ask/go wild with intuition. As such, Clarke strikes a balance in language that evokes lovely, terrifying and totally new volumes of feeling.
The book is resolute in keeping the news coming in and lining the pages with its challenge: to not tune it out but, rather, to learn more and to act, even if that means, as a poem in tribute to Mary Harris “Mother” Jones suggests, “[becoming] the most / dangerous America itself.
Ellen McGrath Smith, Vela Magazine
Through exploring various disasters, Clarke ends up exploring memory—“the worst disaster since the last one”—writing about people lost through the prison system, disasters man-made we don’t wish to think about, and just where the accumulation of disaster upon disaster might end up taking us. “What do you love about this / world? Without what is there nothing // else to say?”
One feels Clarke would like to write past the empty shuddering of decline and detachment (“shitfuckpissdamn / I think is the missing link.”) and back into brutal, soulful life. Consider the quarry. A quarry is both desolate and utterly political; it is an exposure of the wealth of nature and a perversion of it. It is visually non-human, a scorched blast into the earth, and yet the quarry is a baby of investment and a mother to many human hands and pockets, some empty, some lined with money.
Amy K. Bell, JERRY Magazine