77 pp., 6 x 9
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Akron Series in Poetry

The world of Ohio Blue Tips is a place of Marlowe beds and Coniber traps, bluegills and yellow rutabaga, pronating arches and charcoal briquets. It is an interior furnished with Moo-Cow Creamers, eyelet tableskirts, and Mae West cats. Clark's implied narratives confront class and aspiration in the unfamed lives of Joe Silver, a retarded prisoner "whose eyes are the blue tips of kitchen matches," and Quinn Margaret who is "Backslidden and given over / To a reprobate mind."

Though the poems have their own gritty freshness, the sensibility is kin, perhaps, to that of Robert Creeley, Forrest Gander, Lorine Neidecker, William Carlos Williams, and C. D. Wright. In this tradition, Jeanne E. Clark recreates incendiary moments that strike like "wood against wood, Ohio Blue Tips," and transform us forever. She "hears music, / Which is / Its own skin."
-Alice Fulton

Jeanne E. Clark was born and raised in Northwest Ohio. She teaches Creative Writing at Arizona State University and for the Arizona Commission on the Arts as an Artist-in-Education. She was the winner of the 1995 Loft Prize in Poetry.