Clamor

Description

Poetry. Winner the 2010 University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize. Winner of the 2009 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize Selected by D. A. Powell. Written in part while Fenton's husband was deployed as a medic in Baghdad, CLAMOR loosely follows the narrative arc of weeks breathlessly suspended between imminences: word or silence, return or tragedy, heartbreak or gratitude. Yet these are poems that refuse to be sentimental or didactic. Instead, they marry with lyric ferocity the personal and the political in an examination of language and love in 21st century wartime.

“From the smoldering wreckage of a battle-scarred Iraq to ‘the last unmuzzled throatful of air,’ Elyse Fenton’s debut collection clamors with such exigency that it drops us right into the danger zone. Her art is precise, persistent and volatile when deployed to the front lines. But also, sparing: ‘a human camera’ embedded within a relationship tested by the distance from battlefield to home. This book certainly has its disquietude—but how else to measure the brutality of the world? The recompense of it, though, is Fenton’s passionate eloquence; her unfaltering fidelity to the word.”
—D. A. Powell

“CLAMOR connects the forward operating bases in Iraq with the homefront here in America. It is a necessary poetry which brings us the ‘work of shrapnel;’ ‘the thing that, trying and trying—/ you can never spit out’ (while continually recognizing that there is always more to give). In keeping with the best traditions of war poetry, the underlying subjects of Clamor are love and loss. CLAMOR is a book that refuses to turn away. It exists within the deeply personal, the deeply private, and yet—as the poems finish within the reader—it is a work which ultimately speaks to the universal.”
—Brian Turner

“With lines that show an unyielding dedication to craft, these poems are not afraid of meaning or the meaningful. More and more every day, the thinking American asks how she is to believe in love when there is war all about her, and in each of her deeply felt lyrics, Elyse Fenton confronts this question with the kind of tenderness one lover reserves for another. If every poem is indeed a love poem, CLAMOR is indeed a debut worth reading and about which we must make noise.”
—Jericho Brown

Reviews

Virginia Konchan @ Barn Owl Review
Ray McDaniel at The Constant Critic
Univ of Wales 2010 Dylan Thomas Prize Longlist
Michelle Tooker @ Elevate Difference
April Manteris @ Coldfront
Winner of the 2010 University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize [pdf]
Winner of the 2011 Bob Bush Memorial Award for First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters
feature: Poetry Society of America New Poet for 2011, selected by Rachel Zucker
Ruben Quesada @ Fringe Magazine

Author Bio

Elyse Fenton is the author of the poetry collections CLAMOR, winner of the 2010 University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize, and SWEET INSURGENT (Saturnalia 2017), winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Brain, Child, and Prairie Schooner, and has been featured on NPR's All Things Considered and PRI's The World.

Author City: AUSTIN, TX USA

Clamor

Elyse Fenton

Description

Reviews

Author Bio

Order & Customer Service

Information For

For Publishers

SPD Info