Description: Clayton Adam Clark's A Finitude of Skin opens with Missouri, its fissures and declivities and hidden chambers:
Blame it on the limestone--the sinkholes,the speleological interest, an overwhelming
karstness here. People get lost. And indeed, people do get lost. The poems in A Finitude of Skin depict the acting and interacting of so many bodies, from bacteria to armadillos, from seed ticks to an oak tree so big you can't wrap your arms around it. It's in this environment that a narrative takes shape: a couple coming together and then, like everything else, breaking apart. By braiding the language and imagery of these bodies, Clark's verse reflects the complicated ecosystem two people can form, honing in on the strange places they make contact, and don't. Once we become entrenched in these Cave State landscapes and the goings-on of all these bodies, we can see and feel the many ways, "life there is vulnerable to disruption."
Review Quotes: "Clayton Adam Clark finds grace in the irresolvable. In A Finitude of Skin, the binaries that anchor us--anatomy and duende, love and decay, being and mortality--break down beneath the elegant force of Clark's syntax. And within that breaking, he offers us a lens for strange beauty: a man spraying for brown recluses while his lover sleeps, a sculpture of butter, a surgically removed heart, a fragile world where 'No one's wholly distinct / yet each must see his body through.'"
--Matthew Sumpter, author of Public Land