Stray Home

Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry 2009With poems that combine the self-scrutiny of Philip Larkin with the measure of Elizabeth Bishop Amy M. Clark burnishes her first collection Stray Home with exquisite understatement and formal control. Sweeter than Larkin and more intimate than Bishop these poems address the suppressed pain and shame of living as a childless woman in a world of mothers the dissociation attendant on depression and fraught family relationships and the search for a sense of belonging in the face of dislocation. Stray Home cuts deeply to discover the buried emotions and insights universal to all suffering and compassionate human beings. Clark is able to imbue our small usually overlooked moments with unexpected grandeur. A quiet humor is employed in service of her twin gifts imagination and metaphor. This is an accomplished deft and important debut.-Beth Ann Fennelly author of Tender Hooks and judgeAMY M. CLARK grew up in San Luis Obispo California. She is a graduate of Carleton College and holds degrees from the University of Nevada Reno and Spalding University's MFA Program. She works as an editor and divides her time between Concord Massachusetts and San Diego California. Her poems have been published in The Cincinnati Review Cream City Review and 32 Poems.Number Seventeen: Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry