Your Strange Fortune

Chloe N. Clarks Your Strange Fortune is our good fortune. This debut volume of rare sympathy and imagination leaps easily from myths to monsters ghosts to zombies fairy tales to the Apocalypse that for this poet and so many today is just/the fact of life. Clarks inventive unforgettable voice ranges widely-- from up-to-the-moment poems like Googolplex in which curiosity becomes dark compulsion to the far future when museums feature the relics of our own time: the things we could not bear/to leave behind us: / pieces of highways signs/ ...one single spike from Lady/ Libertys crown. Clark understands that time speeds forward and that myth and popular culture are close kin that offer the songs of ghosts who once were us the ones who/ had such beautiful voices but only when/ they thought no one was listening. Like the poets clockwork nightingale whose song is both dystopian and beautiful Chloe Clarks voice rises above the usual din to bring us a debut volume that is rich with unsettling questions but always unflinchingly alive.--Ned Balbo author of The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots and 3 Nights of the Perseids