Set the Table by Nina Clements

$13.99

 

“There is always this rupture—this bursting and cleaving,” Nina Clements writes in her debut Set the Table, a gorgeous collection of poems that confront the frailty of life, while celebrating its beauty. With a mix of the surreal and everyday, the speaker searches for her self amid complex relationships, including the breakup of a marriage. These quiet poems remind us that life is about overcoming and endurance; about finding that “fine chord of silence” where we can come to terms with life.

–Jason Irwin, author of A Blister of Stars (2016)


Prepare yourself for the meal of a lifetime. In her fantastic debut poetry collection, “Set the Table,” Nina Clements presents a dazzling array of poems, all of which are courses in a feast of shape, form, vulnerability, and resonance. From moments where “any gift” is “a burden in disguise” to ants gathering “square granules of salt from my hair, nourishing and sticky in the oil,” every succulent and insightful morsel of this book must not be missed.

–Joey Nicoletti, author of Reverse Graffiti(2015) and Counterfeit Moon (2016)

 

Nina Clements’s Set the Table is an invitation to the intimacy of the sensory family table. In the book’s final poems we find ourselves in a “Reign of Ants” struggling between the “cosmic importance of the self” as represented by ants infesting the tea to find them eventually “marching single file across my belly.” The poems also shine in moments of embodied exalt where “Love is a succession of finger-bruises up my arms” and “palms go slack from the effort” to “make a fist” and bruises take on the flavor of their eggplant stain. This would suggest a sense of violence, but instead the poems are rooted in the everyday sensory details.  These embodied poems make specific demands of the beloved. You must know “the price of plums” and “a splay of fingers across the neck.” We are inside friendships and family tensions and ultimately sharing dinner with the beloved where tomato seeds drip and we are asked to “Give me your heart to hold while you chew” then promised at the end of the meal we will get “the heart back.”
–Rachel M. Simon, author of Theory of Orange (2007) and Marginal Road  (2009)

 

 

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Set the Table

by Nina Clements

$13.99, paper

978-1-63534-196-6

2017

Nina Clements attended Denison University before earning an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She now works as a librarian in Southern California. Set the Table is her first collection.

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