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by Emily Robyn Clark (Author)
"Where do I begin?
The page knows my shaking pen."
These intimate opening lines set the tone of Morning Comes Roaring Down the Mountain, the riveting debut collection from award-winning poet and filmmaker Emily Robyn Clark.
With candor and cinematic vision, Clark writes from the caves of grief and from the longing to scale the mountain in search of beauty.
This is a book shaped by loss. Clark holds her father's hand as he slips away "in a dark dream," only to enter a whirlwind engagement in Paris months later: an emerald ring, a city of light, a future opening before her, until everything collapses like sand. Her fiancé's struggle with mental illness and religious trauma brings her to the edge of death with him, a second grief as sudden and shattering as the first.
But the losses do not end there. Clark writes of the silences we carry when we cannot speak the truth of our hearts: the sapphic longing in "Behind Her Eyes Are Petals," where she loses a friend she never dared confess her love to; the near-drowning of a lover in "Luna Moth"; the quiet despair of a neighbor fighting mental illness in "My Neighbor Samuel"; the emotional exile of characters framed in her Southern Gothic poems, "Maggie the Cat Fights Silence" and "Death Is a Shot in the Dark," where Maggie and Big Daddy lament from within their disintegrating plantation home. In "Spiral Goddess," a personified Lady Columbia cries out against the overturning of Roe v. Wade, while powerful, ancient goddesses awaken between the pages.
The landscape of her poems carries us from the Western wilderness to blood-soaked Southern soil. Clark writes with lyrical precision, offering glimpses of healing and rebirth amid devastation. Her imagery is striking, a natural extension of her training as a filmmaker.
The force that grounds the collection is the mountain, symbolizing the desire to reach the place "where all the beauty came from." The mountain becomes both masculine solidity and the singular obstacles women face. It becomes what protects, what breaks, and the hope we return to. Morning Comes Roaring Down the Mountain is a fierce anthem to the resilient human spirit. While these poems will break you, they will also lift you to the mountain.
"One day, waking from your strange sleep,
when morning comes roaring down the mountain,
tiger-eye gold and gleaming . . .
you'll remember me."
