The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce that The Trouble with Light by Jeremy Michael Clark, finalist for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, is now available.
In The Trouble with Light, Jeremy Michael Clark reflects on the legacy of familial trauma as he delves into questions about belonging, survival, knowledge, and self-discovery in unflinching lyrical poems. “Like you,” he writes, “I have . . . [a] history of / hardly caring for my body, of letting / whoever drink their share of me, / thinking it could cure / my fear of dirt.” Whether ruminating on intimacy, lineage, identity, faith, or addiction, Clark’s poems embody a restless, rigorous curiosity. Largely set in the poet’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, his portraits of interiority gracefully juxtapose the sorrows of alienation and self-neglect with the restorative power of human connection. In one of the most affectionate—and characteristically ambivalent—poems in the collection, Clark recalls, “For days, doubt struck as does lightning / across the span of night. . . . Love? If it exists, / it’s the uncertainty one feels before a thunderclap, / after the sky’s gone dark again.” A vulnerable and transporting debut, The Trouble with Light is a vital record of how grief can endure, and how we can yet endure ourselves.
“Heart-wrenching and eloquent,” writes Rigoberto González. “Jeremy Michael Clark’s poems grapple with the traumas of childhood poverty, an absent father, a violent stepfather, and a southern landscape that, like the speaker, also grapples with the ‘trying times’ of the past. The Trouble with Light lays bare a bittersweet homecoming, a journey that moves slowly through painful memory but pauses to breathe on moments limned with hope. What a striking and glorious debut.”
Jeremy Michael Clark earned his MFA from Rutgers University–Newark and his MSW from the University of Pennsylvania after working as an editorial assistant at Callaloo. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Common, Poem-a-Day, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. His work has also been recognized with support from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Cave Canem, the Community of Writers, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.
Every year, the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and from the books selected awards the $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize in the following summer. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry. The series and prize are named for and operated to honor the cofounder and longtime director of the press, Miller Williams.
“I love poems that vivify and disturb,” says series editor Patrica Smith. “No matter what genre we write in, we’re all essentially storytellers — but it’s poets who toil most industriously, telling huge unwieldy stories within tight and gorgeously controlled confines, stories that are structurally and sonically adventurous, and it’s magic every time it happens. Simply put, when I read a poetry book, I want something to shift in my chest. I want my world to change.”