Finalist, 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Selected by Patricia Smith
In The Trouble with Light, Jeremy Michael Clark reflects on the legacy of familial trauma as he delves into questions about belonging, survival, knowledge, and self-discovery in unflinching lyrical poems. “Like you,” he writes, “I have . . . [a] history of / hardly caring for my body, of letting / whoever drink their share of me, / thinking it could cure / my fear of dirt.” Whether ruminating on intimacy, lineage, identity, faith, or addiction, Clark’s poems embody a restless, rigorous curiosity. Largely set in the poet’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, his portraits of interiority gracefully juxtapose the sorrows of alienation and self-neglect with the restorative power of human connection. In one of the most affectionate—and characteristically ambivalent—poems in the collection, Clark recalls, “For days, doubt struck as does lightning / across the span of night. . . . Love? If it exists, / it’s the uncertainty one feels before a thunderclap, / after the sky’s gone dark again.” A vulnerable and transporting debut, The Trouble with Light is a vital record of how grief can endure, and how we can yet endure ourselves.
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.
“Self-reflective and structurally diverse, Clark uses clever internal rhyming and panoramic imagery to explore family and addiction in this gorgeous debut.”
—Belinda Farley and Charlie Leppert, “Our Favorite Poetry Books of 2024, So Far…“, New York Public Library
“It’s hard to describe the many strengths of this collection, which read like a poet at the top of his game instead of a debut collection. The poems have been stripped of excess, and Clark’s use of form to convey meaning is masterful. For example, the ‘Unauthorized Autobiography’ is a cento poem, composed of lines from other artists, patching together a broken speaker and erasing the speaker completely beneath the words of others. These poems are filled with music and poignant line breaks, and they read like a coming of age story for a Black American speaker who has overcome demons and found a new way of being in the world. The Trouble with Light is haunting and devastating, but it progresses through the stages of transformation one would expect from a hero, and through hard work and hope it ends with the triumphant embrace of the speaker’s own human limits.”
—Sara Lynn Eastler, Southern Review of Books, June 2024
“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
Every year, the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and from the books selected awards the $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize in the following summer. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry. The series and prize are named for and operated to honor the cofounder and longtime director of the press, Miller Williams.
“I love poems that vivify and disturb,” says series editor Patrica Smith. “No matter what genre we write in, we’re all essentially storytellers — but it’s poets who toil most industriously, telling huge unwieldy stories within tight and gorgeously controlled confines, stories that are structurally and sonically adventurous, and it’s magic every time it happens. Simply put, when I read a poetry book, I want something to shift in my chest. I want my world to change.”
