Music and Suicide: Poems

The long-awaited second full-length collection from one of our most exciting poets.

Imagine if you will a pageant on a hill
and picture if you can a boy
designed to be impaled upon a stilt
and bleed for a panelist's joy

Jeff Clark's first collection, The Little Door Slides Back, was hailed as an unclassifiable classic in underground American writing: "A shadow world, seen by a visionary" (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); "thick, purring music" (Rhizome).

In Music and Suicide, his second collection, Clark moves away from the sinisterism and mask-ridden black humor of his debut, into a present mazy with freed shadow, somatic magic, and post-suffocatory seeing.