Music and Suicide

Flower on, happy paperwhite When you bloom you're gorgeous when you wilt --"Drugs" Jeff Clark's first collection, The Little Door Slides Back, was hailed as an unclassifiable classic in underground American writing: "Remarkable for its liveliness and intelligence" ( Chicago Review), "Amazing and ambitious" ( Rain Taxi), "a 120-page spell" ( American Letters & Commentary), "A happy sadomasochism, a luxuriance of prurience" ( Boston Review), "Devoted to the idea of possibility in the poet who operates as free agent, looking to the weather not for the springs of dailiness but for some message from the aether" ( Arras), "[Clark's work] creates . . . our own precursors, precursors who behave differently than our supposed avant-garde" ( Rhizome). In Music and Suicide Clark is no longer underground. He moves away from the sinisterism and mask-ridden black humor of his debut, toward new realms of clarity, dissent, and sex. Neither a traditionalist nor an experimentalist-if being one means not being the other-Clark once again is engaged in radically beautiful poem-making, but, as Guy Kyser states, "Something affected him down in the desert."