How to Communicate

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A stunning debut from an award-winning DeafBlind poet, “ is a masterpiece” (Kaveh Akbar). brims with the talent and generosity of a living classic. And what a talent! Take, for instance, Slateku, a form John Lee Clark has created based on Braille: it is both inimitable and available to anyone. Or take his brilliant prose poems that are completely unlike any other prose poems I have read.… There is simply no one else like John Lee Clark and I envy the readers who discover him for the first time. The poems in John Lee Clark’s revolutionary work together as a manifesto that lays bare the ways in which a society that assumes seeing and hearing as the norm views touch as suspicious, enough so to try to outlaw touch. And yet, if manifesto, also invitation: what might it mean to write ‘forward in a different direction and from a different spatial perspective,’ Clark asks, and goes on to show us, in poems of formal virtuosity, of fierce tenderness, of triumphant community.… is the steadily revelatory gift I didn’t know I’d been waiting for. A rare and gorgeous collection powered by human touch. John Lee Clark’s poems approach, feel, and detail what we thought we recognized—a tree, an airplane, and even Goldilocks—on their way to challenging and enlarging our understanding of agency, community, and, most of all, language itself. is a vital and precious bridge made of language—and once crossed, it will transform readers’ sense of the world. US

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