1001 Facts of Prehistoric Life

“With wit and with heart, Jo Ann Clark’s 1001 Facts of Prehistoric Life boldly revises the taxonomies of our personal and collective destinies. In the strata of her precise, canny poems, she entwines natural history and private life, menageries and congeries, the mythic and the quotidian, and that strong braid shimmers with genuine intelligence and urgency. This is a rich, daring debut.”

-Robert Farnsworth

Jo Ann Clark’s poetry is formally strenuous, hinged and re-hinged with lexical play, and it is through these exertions of language that her poems track the difficult terrains of longing and suffering. Her recent work excavates a fossil record of the collective unconscious, relying not on metaphor, but on a kind of tangential algorithm for the-way-we-live-now. One poem explains that ‘To hold/ the window to the frame/ we rely on friction/ or poker-faced fictions/ or the sheer habit of things/ to keep themselves/ together’. Clark’s poetry unearths these fictions and frictions, the utterances that comprise the work of being, by turns messy and honed, wry and vulnerable-all of it, as she writes in ‘Scheherezade in Iceland,’ – ‘irresistibly inconvenient.'”

-B.K. Fischer

Here is a poet eager or at least willing to abide by The Facts, i.e. her synonyms for erotic propositions, whenever they turn up and however volatile. She maintains, in her Scheherazade periods, that her much younger sister Dinarzade, hiding under a bed in the royal chamber, divulges such things. Such tales. Not since the inspired observations of the late Amy Clampitt have I heard the like, though Jo Ann Clark is not so garrulous as that lady (nor so ladylike either, which will probably make things easier for Ms Clark’s readers). I don’t mean nastier; if I mean anything it is probably undesigning. But surely it’s The Facts that count.”

– Richard Howard