Trouble with Light

Jeremy Michael Clark earned his MFA from Rutgers University–Newark and his MSW from the University of Pennsylvania after working as an editorial assistant at Callaloo. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Common, Poem-a-Day, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. His work has also been recognized with support from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Cave Canem, the Community of Writers, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.

“Heart-wrenching and eloquent, Jeremy Michael Clark’s poems grapple with the traumas of childhood poverty, an absent father, a violent stepfather, and a southern landscape that, like the speaker, also grapples with the ‘trying times’ of the past. The Trouble with Light lays bare a bittersweet homecoming, a journey that moves slowly through painful memory but pauses to breathe on moments limned with hope. What a striking and glorious debut.” —Rigoberto GonzÁlez, author of To the Boy Who Was Night“In The Trouble with Light, Clark illuminates how the past not only remains present but also offers a force to keep us alive. There’s wisdom in these poems informed by experience and fueled by love. There’s also a redefining of home as a place that develops a culture you’re living within, while another home and culture develops within you. That’s to say, these poems made me take a long look at my own life. Clark, when all seems lost, ‘brings a kind / light, a clarity, forgetting everything / night makes possible.’ When faced with crossing troubled waters, turn to these poems and bathe instead in their glow.” —A. Van Jordan, author of When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again“With spellbinding music, Clark conjures a bittersweet coming-of-age. These poems are full of tenderness, deep longing, and familial reckoning: “a desire to know, & a belief / he deserved to.” Each poem delivers us into mystery, like the river that both divides and carries the poet’s home city. These are stunning songs of Black boyhood from an exciting new voice.” —Kiki Petrosino, author of Bright: A Memoir