Other Clues reviews
Reviews and publication information:
Grafton explains her writing process for Other Clues: http://omnidawn.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/poet-feature-grace-grafton/
Other links for examples of Grafton’s poetry:
http://www.poemeleon.org/grace-marie-grafton2/
Reviews
Who is she, the star of our poems, star of the privately oracular? What are the clues to the self, I mean the other clues, breaking out past autobiography toward the inner allegories, which are paradoxically found not inside but out? And how to find them? “Begin with the flawed riot, rakish remedy for too much not-enough,” Grace Grafton writes in her marvelous new book of poems, Other Clues. Hemmed in by contemporary materiality and over-definition, since a child she has been building her “amiable solitude” which has made her reckless, full of complaint, impatient for the ecstatic: “How many stories are the jewelry of the world?” On such a journey, “the stanza cannot hold,” and neither can the sentence. Yet there is wisdom amidst the chaos. Eros. Nature. There are the tutelary spirits of the plants and the nouns.
— Melissa Kwasny, author of Reading Novalis in Montana
“Silence under leaves lent her heart habit,” writes Grace Grafton in Other Clues. Indeed, an organic silence lends these allegorical poems the precision essential for a lyricism so tonally concise as to merge seamlessly with the real, even as it measures deftly the weight of essence within “discussions between sunrise and sunset, allowances, the everlasting clothes.” Grafton has the insight to draw readers into the epicenter of lived experience where simple logic is shed, where the chaos of daily event turns round a still point of intense recognition—whether it be the revelatory surprise of natural beauty or the indelible necessity of our search for meaning in a troubled world. But this isn't a recognition that directs the reader toward a single, grandly orchestrated epiphany. Rather, we recognize a door opening, and behind that door another “clue” to the “otherness” at the core of the commonplace. We needn’t look to these poems for answers, but rather for opportunities to quicken our own adaptive clairvoyance.
— Rusty Morrison, author of the true keeps calm biding its story