our own soft Katie Clark Nostrovia! Press, 2017 As I sit with this book, the past couple of weeks have been nothing but cold. Winter reared its ugly head with bitter wind and snow packing the ground. These past few days, a change has occurred. The sun is staying out longer, the world is thawing, and the muddy mess left underneath is exposed. With this change of season, I think about the power of memory. The need to unearth something, no matter how painful. Katie Clark’s debut collection, our own soft (Nostrovia! Press, 2017), takes the toil of memory in grip and wrestles with it in full force. Tackling love, loss, violence, and gender this collection is a fresh look into contemporary poetry and the work of memory. Throughout the collection, the speaker calls the dead home. Poems like “the article mentioned what color sweater you were wearing but none of them mentioned your shoe”,”i heard someone say jacksonville today”, and “for cody, in the rhododendrons” recall the dead in a very personal way. At times it feels like a reading a journal entry closely tied to the loss of a dear friend. These moments hint at each other throughout the collection, as “for cody, in the rhododendrons” says: tonight they will read your writings in jacksonville but i am in massachusetts and everything is starting to lose itself to winter. i am reading the rhododendron story. i am wondering if you meant azaleas and i hope not In this moment, the speaker will connect both “for cody” and “i heard someone say jacksonville today” with the talk of place and the weather. The collection constantly remembers what is it be a part of the winter, what it is to thaw, and how the world adapts to this change in substance. Apart from the connection of place, there is a focus on punctuation and syntax that is refreshing. The pieces are mostly void of proper capitalization and this makes the words feel as if we are reading them out of someone’s journal, something we shouldn’t be reading, but can’t stop pouring over. This flood of personal memory becomes vividly clear in the poem “fledge”. This poem always plays with fragments of thought with the use of repeated slashes, something that enhances the idea of these pieces being a personal memory. /that summer you told me you shaved your pubic hair,/lifting your leg up onto the bed/ how the first time cut/ /the red & the red & the red/ the water & skin/ 15 years old then,/ beach-house light/ The use of the body and focus on gender is apparent in Katie’s collection. They work through the muddy understanding of gender to fuel memories of violence in the piece “seven pines” in 3rd grade i didn’t flinch when you called me pretty/even though i hadn’t gotten my period like the other girls/ you liked / or in fourth grade when/ you dared your friend to kiss me / with tongue / even though i had my playclothes on / how you held my arms down / watched / him take what he took / let him that night i filled my mouth so full of mud / it was all i was Clark also focuses on trying to understand the body in the poem “pink water” this is the part besides/before the body and what it takes, so disloyal to what it owns it keeps the cancer-kind of secret, letting you live within the not knowing as it grows These moments reflect on what the speaker knows of their own body and what it is to grow into it. The body is a something that is always intertwined with memory and Clark’s work is something that tries to place all of these memories into a living and growing thing. They work to see what is possible when all of the memory is dissected and connected to the living body. This collection is a very personal and revealing account of how loss and violence can shape memory, but it also spends time reflecting on the moments after the violence and loss.In “someone told me winter ends” Katie Clark writes to push past life’s blizzard and comes out and the other side into a new spring. someday, something with hatch (or we will bury it in the woods behind your house) until then, i can give you this: i woke up this morning to clean flannel sheets, to the sun turning it all blue outside to the radiator stopped, the window left open to a warm dream in massachusetts. accident: we wake up & it’s june. As the snow becomes water and the water becomes a constant burden on the ground, poems like these will make the reader reflect on their deeply dense and personal understanding of living past and through violence. Katie Clark’s our own soft is a calming collection that comes after a cruel winter, daring to lay all of its memory in front of the reader to make them stare back. Visit Nostrovia! Press' Website

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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