Choosing the Lake
In Choosing the Lake, Nina Clements’s second full-length poetry collection, the lake serves as the central metaphor: a place of healing and penance, a place of exile, as well as rebirth. In these sparse, yet eloquent meditations, the speaker navigates a landscape where scar tissue along the ridges of the heart resembles ice and the movement of tectonic plates. These poems are always in search of what is not here, of what is lost, and what can be taken away. They are familiar because they speak to us directly, conjuring our own fears and desires.
—Jason Irwin, author of The History of Our Vagrancies
2024, Kelsay Books, 84 pages
Our Mother of Sorrows
In this stunning debut poetry collection, Clements utilizes heartfelt lyricism to explore the hard turns that familial bonds, motherhood, and faith play in the world. These are poems that sing out in a broken bottle chorus of the ways that people share the common, the uncommon, and the unexpectant in light of the world that we are told must be. In Our Mother of Sorrows, we see the ways that familial love and expectations meet the hard edge of tragedy and darkness. These are poems that sing of the sparkling glimmers in the midst of everyday life. Glimmers that reveal the simple wonder, both enlightening and enraging, that comprise a life lived and the quiet, most personal struggles, that people and families endure.
2020, Urban Farmhouse Press, 96 pages
Prepare yourself for the meal of a lifetime. In her fantastic debut poetry collection, “Set the Table,” Nina Clements presents a dazzling array of poems, all of which are courses in a feast of shape, form, vulnerability, and resonance. From moments where “any gift” is “a burden in disguise” to ants gathering “square granules of salt from my hair, nourishing and sticky in the oil,” every succulent and insightful morsel of this book must not be missed.
~Joey Nicoletti, author of Reverse Graffiti (2015) and Counterfeit Moon (2016)
2017, Finishing Line Press, 42 pages