Synopses & Reviews
Winner the 2010 University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize
Winner of the 2009 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize (Selected by D. A. Powell)
Written in part while Fenton's husband was deployed as a medic in Baghdad, Clamor loosely follows the narrative arc of weeks breathlessly suspended between imminences: word or silence, return or tragedy, heartbreak or gratitude. Yet these are poems that refuse to be sentimental or didactic. Instead, they marry with lyric ferocity the personal and the political in an examination of language and love in 21st-century wartime.
Review
"Clamor is a meditation on loyalty...to the responsibility of making the impossible possible, through the reclamation of the power of vision, and, thus, dreams." Virginia Konchan, Barn Owl Review
Review
"Elyse Fenton’s first book of poems, Clamor, features some of the finest contemporary poetry on war. She captures both the battlefield and the homefront with an unwavering realism. Her imagery is fresh and her language rich." Michelle Tooker, Elevate Difference
About the Author
Elyse Fenton won the 2010 University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize and the 2008 Pablo Neruda Award from Nimrod International Literary Journal. She has published poetry and nonfiction in The New York Times, Best New Poets, and The Massachusetts Review. She received her MFA. from the University of Oregon and has worked in the woods, on farms, and in the schools in New Hampshire, Texas, and the Pacific Northwest.