A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World: Poems - Paperback

by Adam Clay (Author)

The haunting and crystalline poems in Adam Clay's A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World examine the moment when solitude slips into separation, when a person realizes he can barely see the place he set out from, and must make his way back to the present.

Imagining the return to daily life as a negotiation between an inner world and the natural one, this collection tracks the subtly shifting tenors of thought that occur as the landscape around the speaker changes. In this journey, reverie can be a siren's song, and Thoreau's "border life" between civilization and wildness is realized in all its possibilities and difficulties. The resulting poems live somewhere between those of James Wright and John Ashbery: they seek wholeness even as they acknowledge that "a fragment is as complete as thought can be."

Thoughtful and subtly complex, A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World is a collection filled with a generous gentleness--an attention to the world so careful it's as if the mind is "washing each grain of sand."

Front Jacket

One of the best young American poets writing today, Adam Clay engages fully with the natural world, gracefully dredging up the mysteries embedded in modern life--paper dolls clipped from the morning news, the ringing ears of lightning-strike victims--and bringing 'the patient sadness that will outwait the memory of a spark' to life in precise swirls of language. Each poem shimmers with physical and metaphysical insight, and Clay's endless storms and seasons resonate with wisdom and music. This is a brilliant collection of poems.
--Alex Lemon

"These poems are sentient and surprising as only living things can be, intimate and compelling precisely because they don't aim to please, but to exist. In his own words, reading this book is like 'centering yourself along unrecorded boundaries' that Clay has somehow managed to discern for us and translate into poems that are in turns clear and strange, and always warmly memorable."
--Bob Hicok

"These poems hover in and out of dreams, follow the mind's wild wanderings, interrogate language, reveal the heart's ambitions, all the while remaining brilliantly anchored to the physicality of all things earthbound. This is a book that lives as much in the curious mind as it does in the undeniable weather of the real world, and Clay travels expertly between the two with a gentle, inspired grace."
--Ada Limón

"Adam Clay locates the poetic realm at the very limit of what is known, a hotel teetering on the flat world's precipice, where every visitor is temporary. Not only does one hear Dickinson whisper, 'My Business is Circumference, ' Clay arrives also with a Whitmanesque capacity for affirmation, 'The lyrical quality of a weed.' His poems sing themselves through their own complications, searching for that beautiful order language has no part of, but only language can reveal. 'May I for a moment be nervous?' the poet asks. The answer in the poems themselves is their wondrous nerve."
--Dan Beachy-Quick

"Immediately striking about the poems in Clay's second book is their lack of self-consciousness. . . This poet locates himself at the borders between nature and language, solitude and community, the physical and metaphysical where paradox and fragmentation are at once evaded and embraced."
--Publishers Weekly

Author Biography

Adam Clay is the author of The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006) and three chapbooks. His work has been published in A Public Space, Gulf Coast, and The Iowa Review. He co-edits Typo Magazine, curates the Poets in Print Reading Series at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center, and teaches at Western Michigan University. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.