Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars

Patricia Clark's poems immerse the reader in the living world through the quality of her attention and appreciation. There's hard-won intelligence here. We see it in people sharing a meal and being especially kind to each other after a suicide: lots of please and thanks / as we handed food around / basket of steaming bread / for buttering. Always, there is a deep understanding of our interconnections, as in the lovely and evocative final stanza of "Near the Tea House at Meijer Japanese Garden," now tracing a pale blue vein / under the skin like a leaf's midrib. We would do well to take Patricia Clark's guidance: The charge: note what is here, what departs.

-Ellen Bass, Indigo

About the Author
Clark, Patricia: - Patricia Clark is the author of The Canopy (Terrapin Books, 2017), her fifth book of poetry which won the 2018 PSV Book of the Year Award, and three chapbooks, including Deadlifts (New Michigan Press, 2018). She teaches in the Writing Department at Grand Valley State University in Michigan where she is also the university's poet in residence. She has won The Fourth River's Folio Competition, Mississippi Review's Poetry Prize, second prize in the Pablo Neruda/Hardiman Prize from Nimrod, and was the co-winner of Poetry Society of America's Lucille Medwick Prize. She has completed residencies at The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Colony, and The Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. She was also the poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan from 2005-2007, and for many years she coordinated Poetry Night, part of GVSU's Fall Arts Celebration.