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

“In a world hell-bent on talking loud, Acie Clark's Small Talk quietly invites us to cozy up & settle into the softened everydayness of queerness. ‘The coffee was good’ & Clark's south was queer. So goes the truth of our histories. A gracious gift, like prayer or truth whisped through the field, these poems make new friends on porches, pour us each a fresh new glass of water or call us in for dinner in new living rooms. Small Talk is both tender in its vulnerability & holds all sounds & stories in its quiet. A book of poems that tell us ‘how to live, or to live’ as we await the coming weather.” —Brody Parrish Craig, author of The Patient is an Unreliable Historian

“Acie Clark’s Small Talk is a tender, wondrous debut. Mitotic and expansive, this collection makes room for the many selves we are and have been, and calls them into the future. Clark celebrates the companions we are and need: the dog, the deer, the birds and the horse. These poems are prayers and inquiries, portals and mirrors, holy and sublime.” —Donika Kelly, author of The Natural Order of Things

“Small Talk conjures a world in which all beings are known to be made of each other—our world, truly known. Here, not one soul—not the poet’s father or mother, not the cattle or the turnips or Arkansas, not the girl he once was or his red dog (never, never his dog)—not one love is left behind. These miraculous poems bend physics, time, memory, language into a circle of life that refuses to be anything but whole. Acie Clark is a poet writing with the clarity of a mystic, through bone-deep knowledge of nonduality. Small Talk is a transubstantiation. An astonishing debut, written by a poet’s poet. I am changed by this book.” —Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of Erase Genesis