Small Talk

New Southern Voices Poetry Book Prize winner Acie Clark’s debut collection asks us to lean into conversation.

Acie Clark wants to talk. In his debut collection, Clark reconsiders our relationship to talking about work and the weather. These poems tell the story of a trans man coming into a new literal and figurative voice while finding language for the world around him. In platonic love poems, interfaith self-talk, and images of the queer south, Clark calls contradictions into question.

From a poet Marie Howe once praised as “a stubborn inquisitive mind at work here and a resilient heart,” Small Talk introduces a unique new voice. Through lenses of recovery, birding, caregiving, gospel and semantics, this collection believes in multiplicities, in the seemingly contradicting identities that make us who we are, and that talking to each other might still save us.

Praise for Small Talk

"These poems are elemental. They gleam with a hard-won clarity, unafraid to reckon with public and personal histories as a trans man grieving a grandfather whose memory fades, negotiating a path toward sobriety, and seeking what is holy in a rural landscape keenly and movingly observed. Rebuking fixedness and inflexibility, Small Talk celebrates change with a spirit of play and generosity." —Derrick Austin, contest judge, author of Tenderness