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4.0 

How to Communicate: Poems

By John Lee Clark
How to Communicate: Poems by John Lee Clark digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

Winner of the 2023 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry
Longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry

A stunning debut from an award-winning DeafBlind poet, “How to Communicate is a masterpiece” (Kaveh Akbar).

Formally restless and relentlessly instructive, How to Communicate is a dynamic journey through language, community, and the unfolding of an identity. Poet John Lee Clark pivots from inventive forms inspired by the Braille slate to sensuous prose poems to incisive erasures that find new narratives in nineteenth-century poetry. Calling out the limitations of the literary canon, Clark includes pathbreaking translations from American Sign Language and Protactile, a language built on touch.

How to Communicate embraces new linguistic possibilities that emanate from Clark’s unique perspective and his connection to an expanding, inclusive activist community. Amid the astonishing task of constructing a new canon, the poet reveals a radically commonplace life. He explores grief and the vagaries of family, celebrates the small delights of knitting and visiting a museum, and, once, encounters a ghost in a gas station. Counteracting the assumptions of the sighted and hearing world with humor and grace, Clark finds beauty in the revelations of communicating through touch: “All things living and dead cry out to me / when I touch them.”

A rare work of transformation and necessary discovery, How to Communicate is a brilliant debut that insists on the power of poetry.

11 Reviews

4.0
“5⭐ Oh my god... This collection of poetry is an absolutely awe-inspiring work of emotional vulnerability. John Lee Clark, as a deafblind individual, crafts impactful poems that immerse the reader in an alternative form of life that so rarely gets attention. Clark conveys emotional depth, humanity, sadness, and hope within his work, and I can only be so grateful for his contribution to the world of poetry with his words.”
“3.5/5 ⭐️ This was such an interesting one for me because I don’t really read poetry often and it doesn’t always work for me. However this one was interesting! It was written by a DeafBlind poet and spanned such a range of form and content. The poems had a lot to say about his own personal experiences, identity, and communication. There was a variety of types of poetry as well including reimaginings of existing poems in this author’s perspective and written translations of ASL or Protactile poems in addition to his own original work. While I found all the poems thought provoking, there were some I felt deeply connected to and others I genuinely just didn’t understand (possibly due to cultural/linguistic differences and just inexperience reading poetry, but I’m also an idiot). Poetry is just such a subjective art form, and not all of these worked for me, but it did have some standouts for me that I could see myself returning to again.”

About John Lee Clark

John Lee Clark is an award-winning writer and Protactile educator. He has received the Krause Essay Prize and a National Magazine Award for his prose. His poetry collection, How to Communicate, received the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award. A 2021–2023 Bush Fellow, he lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with his partner, the ASL Deaf artist Adrean Clark, their three kids, and two cats.

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