Overview

"Narrators are never the exclusive property of prose fiction, according to this new chapbook collection, The Unreliable Narrator, by C.M. Clark. In these poems, the author explores how all speakers - even when embodied in written language - can sometimes be forthcoming, and sometimes simply unreliable. There are always unresolved questions concerning whose voice a poem manifests. From the dramatic monologue form, where a character ""speaks"" the poem, to a confessional set of lines - or in the case of the prose-poem a block of text - any poem's persona is open to the reader's interpretation. Is any poem ever the poet speaking? Or are all poetic voices more properly unreliable narrators, after all?"

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"There is a solitary, seeing about the soul's business, cast in these excursions taken in the poems of The Unreliable Narrator. At stake is the culpability of witness: has the will at eyeblink speed come to essential truth underlying experience; and heart, caged in its juddering mien received real messages of life? Herein is travelogue, a vagrant telling-spoken with every breath. There is the grand sideshow of ""getting there""-set upon a beaten track-one coast to another amid ""numbing hours...miles,"" crossing dead spots...between points, and a perilous descent through the warm peninsula air where all conviction belies separation from a world we must be helped into and out of despite our illusions of vision and power. You already own the ticket for this ride. Pray-settle-into the marrow of these pages as into a life. -Sean Sexton, author of Portals and May Darkness Restore Because this collection shape-shifts poem by poem, whether its narrators are real or avatars or imagined doesn't matter. What does, is the way its language can without warning turn cinematic: ""The drawer with flatware juddered in closing, / hiding coupons, and lyrics to songs/ that frame the stanzas of every evening's lullaby, / these late days left unsung. But/ I hear it. Between waves./ Unseen/ like the air./ Unflinching/ like the sea."" -Lola Haskins, author of Asylum, Improvisions on John Clare (Pittsburgh) and Homelight (Charlotte Lit)"

Author Information

C.M. Clark's work has appeared throughout the U.S., in Canada, and internationally. Publication credits include Painted Bride Quarterly, West Trade Review, Wild Roof Journal, Bookends Review, Prime Number Magazine, Vallum Magazine (Montreal), Punt Volat (Barcelona), The Paddock Review, Pegasus, Ovenbird, and the South Florida Poetry Journal. Her work has been anthologized in collections including Anhinga Press's Rumors, Secrets and Lies, Demeter Press's Travellin' Mama, in Voices from the Fierce Intangible World (South Florida Poetry Journal Annual), and in Chasing Light (Yellow Jacket Press). Clark was a finalist for the Anhinga Press 2021 Chapbook Prize, and runner-up for the Slate Roof Press Elyse Wolf Prize. Clark is the author of full-length works Exoskeletal (Solution Hole Press, 2019), Dragonfly (Solution Hole Press, 2016), Charles Deering Forecasts the Weather & Other Poems (Solution Hole Press, 2012), The Blue Hour (Three Stars Press, 2007), Pillow Talk, a collaboration with painter Georges LeBar (Porky Pie Press, 2007), as well as the chapbook, The Five Snouts, (Finishing Line Press, 2017).

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