Allison Adair

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poet - essayist - professor

Allison Adair

REVIEWS OF THE CLEARING

New York Times, “New & Noteworthy Poetry”

“The poems in Adair’s debut draw on folklore and the animal world to assert feminist viewpoints and mortal terror in lush musical lines.”

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Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“Adair considers in her imaginative debut the intersection of human and animal life, closely examining the experience of womanhood. The nonhuman subjects of the poems are often vaguely menacing, though presented in a way that inspires awe rather than fear.”

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The Millions, “Must-Read Poetry”

From Nick Ripatrazone: “The opening poem in the collection feels like a fable and nightmare; a scene out of time. […] We leave the poem a little scared, a little curious, and certainly more aware[.]”

Boston Globe, “Alchemical Lyrics”

From Nina MacLaughlin: “Boston-based poet Allison Adair’s astonishing and luminous debut collection, The Clearing (Milkweed), out this week, and winner of the Max Ritvo Prize, throbs with the secrets that live behind the folktales.”

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Lit Hub, “Best New Books to Read This Summer”

From Aaron Robertson: “Juxtaposing somber images from the natural world (a runt rabbit, a strangled swan, a floor of dead birds, a landscape made of a woman’s hair) against seemingly more durable material like bones, chicken wire, rifles, and coins, Adair’s poems take as their central subject emotional and physical violence against women, which in this collection distorts all of life’s natural processes.”

Los Angeles Review

From Mandana Chaffa: “Whether Adair is focusing on the complexity of relationships or the expansiveness of our natural world, there’s a timeless depth and rooting in these explorations. Her vision is kaleidoscopic, in the way she manipulates phrases and images, remaking them into dazzling new impressions.”

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Los Angeles Review of Books

From Rachel Hadas: “Adair’s best poems are brave and fierce; they celebrate even as they deplore. […] There’s a stubborn, candid, heartbroken loyalty to that spitting skillet, that rural route.”

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Colorado Review

From Kyle Torke: “Electric, brilliant with loss and searching[…], the poems express the fuse-like warning of time: how what we get is not what we expect, that we may feel or see consequences only vaguely in the turmoil of a moment, and that history is always beneath us either in memory or literally.”

Empty Mirror

From Dasha Bulatova: The Clearing offers “an immersive linguistic world that invites a lingering, engaged contemplation and invites repeated readings and renderings of your own experience into its pages.”

Green Mountains Review

From Anne Graue: “Adair is in command of numerous figurative tools that she uses to expose difficult stories about living in different places, living with different people, fleeing, or remembering things that have happened that alter the characters in numerous ways. Instead of what might be expected, like the changes of the seasons, readers get questions and comparisons that are not always neat or pretty.”

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RHINO Poetry

From Elline Lipkin: “Adair’s lush writing and its underpinning themes of threat, danger, and risk, much of it inherent in the lives of women, make for a nuanced, evocative, and glittering first book..”

Plume

From Chelsea Wagenaar: “The poems of The Clearing form an intricate, compelling whole, sensual and musical, haunted (one poem literally featuring a ghost), and committed to focusing on what is often too blurry to see.”

Aquifer: The Florida Review

From Collin Callahan: “Adair’s phrases are rural incantations that swirl in the throat like heavy smoke, and each image is refreshing as a gulp from the backyard spigot—worth returning to again and again.”

Sugar House Review

From Natalie Homer: “The Clearing is a book of prospecting, of gleaning. Through the wisdom and emotional intelligence of these poems, the reader emerges with coal in one hand and gold in the other.”

RELATED ESSAYS & INTERVIEWS

Kenyon Review, “Poetry Today: Immersion and Freedom”

Interview with Ruben Quesada about reading deeply, digital storytelling, direct address, & poetry’s potential: “In many cases it’s the very aspect of your experience you might be self-conscious about, what you might even be inclined to diminish, hide, or dismiss, that will make your work vital and fresh. Your weirdness is your wisdom.”

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Split Lip Magazine, “Unlikely Pairings: A Conversation with Allison Adair”

Interview with Madeleine Barnes about chaos vs. clarity, “clearing” as revision, & more: “I hope folks find pleasure in the book’s sensory truths: treadle threshers squealing and sea stones raking the shore, the neon green of a firefly’s plasma, the way salt swells our tongues’ tiny pores. Hopefully the book’s images read not just as ornament but as distillations of the paradoxes we all know.”

Mass Poetry, “Getting to Know Allison Adair”

Interview about influences, writing routine, natural imagery in The Clearing, and more: “On one hand, it gives me pause when rural narratives are classified as “folk tales.” On the other, I love how that designation honors mettle, collaboration, communal storytelling and oral histories, mystery, brutal paradox, and the otherworldly gospel of the ground.”

Tinderbox, “Catching Up with Allison Adair”

Former contributor interview. Includes micro reviews of Sarah Blake’s Let’s Not Live on Earth, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s The Mountains Sing, Christopher Boucher’s Big Giant Floating Head, Marcus Wicker’s Silencer, and David Rothenberg’s Survival of the Beautiful.

Milkweed, “Voice in a Time of Distance”

Reading of “After the Police Have Been Called” and “Crown Cinquain for a Lost Child, Eight Years Later” and interview for National Poetry Month. Also features poets Adam Clay, Kathryn Cowles, Brooke Matson, and Patricia Kirkpatrick.

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Lit Hub, “The Spiritual Mysteries Beneath Our Feet”

Essay about things underground: “I, and my poems, have a tendency to look down, to read the ground for what it holds, what’s been buried or sown, abandoned, compressed into coal, brined then spat out as silver, mined, fracked, pushed down or painted over.”

Milkweed, “Deep Cuts” Interview

Interview about The Clearing with Bailey Hutchinson: “Melancholy and loss, fragility, decay, these are hard to avoid when you look closely at green things. But I don’t think they’re anything to fear. To me, they deepen an experience, rather than sinking it. […] You love harder, not less.”

Frontier, “How It’s Made” Interview

Interview about the book’s development: “The whole manuscript process forces you to squeeze more juice out of your default strategies. A move that’s charming or surprising in one poem becomes trite or predictable if it’s used too often—so, just as writing a very long poem does, crafting a collection requires increased delicacy and creative problem-solving.”

Kenyon Review, “On Books and Their Harbors” Series

Collaborative interview with Anna Claire Weber from White Whale Bookstore:

“ACW: [H]ow does it feel having a collection out in the world, with readers making their own interpretations of the poems?

AA: It feels great. Coronavirus delayed the mail, so there was a week where other people had the book, but I hadn’t yet seen it. I needed that—to be reminded that the book was out in the world, no longer mine.”

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The LaHave Review, Interview

“Extremes are a satisfying kind of narrative conclusion. They’re decisive. But ‘the middle way,’ in some respects, is harder. It requires constant awareness of and preparedness for the poles, like keeping your knees slightly bent on a moving train. There’s generative potential in that state. For some it might seem safe, or protective, but for artists it’s likely to feel tense, anxious, and usefully so, the way magnets calibrated just right can make an object levitate.”

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