How to Communicate: Poems

The poems in John Lee Clark's revolutionary How to Communicate 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.... How to Communicate is the steadily revelatory gift I didn't know I'd been waiting for.--Carl Phillips, author of Then the War
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. How to Communicate is a vital and precious bridge made of language--and once crossed, it will transform readers' sense of the world.--Aviya Kushner, author of Wolf Lamb Bomb
How to Communicate 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.--Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic