I’m excited to announce that the Winter 2023-2024 issue of Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature is live. This issue boasts reviews for 11 books, and included among these is my review of Clark A. Pomerleau’s Every Day, They Became Part of Him. I first encountered Pomerleau’s exceptional poetry when he submitted to Wordgathering, and I am thrilled to see him publish this second collection with Finishing Line Press, who published his first chapbook, Better Living Through Cats. If you click that link, you’ll see that I wrote a blurb for his first book, and I’m so happy to offer a full-length review of this new one!
Here’s how the review begins:
“Language is our strength.”
This powerful line is tucked into the middle of “Sharp,” a modest poem from Clark A. Pomerleau’s new collection, Every Day, They Became Part of Him. While these poems revisit grief, nature, family, and identity, Pomerleau constantly adjusts the focus, the zoom lens, the intensity of feeling. He offers a panorama of stones, pines, and rivers and follows birds from the ground; he walks beside Walt Whitman and Jericho Brown. And in “Sharp,” he sits us close to a child-self, vulnerable to the heft and angle of language:“He sharpened my tongue
as a weapon against bullying.
Tuned my timbre to ring
with shrewd contempt if attacked.…
I was tender and needed to parry
in defense.
Then.“
In microcosm, this poem speaks to its neighbors as Pomerleau searches for “crumbs of identity” in a “soup of stories.” Words like “bullying” and “tender” attach themselves to the brave openness that Pomerleau allows in the more challenging poems of this collection. But weaponized language does not cast this book in a haze of violence.
Read the full review here.
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