Music for a Wedding [Paperback]

Winner of the 2016 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

Lauren Clark’s poems move lucidly, depicting beautiful struggles of distrust, dream, grief, and intimacy. They show such conflicts through entrancing narrative drive and song-like abandon. In their unpredictable, unforgettable language, they make pain a tonic for pleasure, sorrow ground for revelation. This is a book that is celebratory, gentle, and queer.

"In this dreamlike debut, Clark seeks the impossible ritual—a conditional that could never be fulfilled, the one 'in which metaphor stops being habit/ and becomes real.' Searching for that transformational power, the poems uncover a newly emergent self. Clark’s central metaphor is an otherworldly, logic-defying, fragmented ceremony that shifts from wedding to funeral and back, replete with rites that are both hopeful and abnegating. . . . Despite the elusive and impermanent nature of the book’s setting, the body (“the unlearnable instrument is/ the body attached to us”) remains remarkably present and its beating heart is what grounds the collection and lets the reader travel along. Clark manages to be both optimistic and mournful at once; their writing embodies a complete experience."
—Publishers Weekly

“Lauren Clark’s imagination is, paradoxically, both torrential and discriminating. Their writing is forceful and self-delighting yet minutely attentive to the world’s particulars. They deploy in these stunning poems the maximum amount of intellectual power consistent with a delicacy of perception, subtle sonic and rhetorical modulations, and emotional honesty and vulnerability. Their poems are a marriage and reconciliation of many if not of all the disparate, contradictory, and opposing elements of our experience.”
—Vijay Seshadri, judge

“Clark’s work is entirely original, but springs lãå