None of It Belongs to Me — Elizabeth Clark Wessel
Elizabeth Clark Wessel’s debut collection gathers poems that track the cadences of daily thought as they happen. In this book, Clark Wessel unspools layers of mythology—of places, people, historical and ahistorical time—and finds their entanglements with everyday life, revealing marvelous influences encoded in the ordinary. Mary Wollstonecraft, new parenthood, the Anthropocene, wars, migrations, domestic truths—this is a poet of love affairs with complicated realities. She writes, “We can never know where/we’re on our way to/and I will never be content/with this box of words”—in None of It Belongs to Me, Clark Wessel relentlessly searches language, finding rare, spacious, exhilarating insights along the way.
Praise for None of It Belongs to Me
What is being Elizabeth Clark Wessel? In None of It Belongs to Me, everything seems to happen as if on film, at 24 frames per second, and that sequence – its narration of actions – becomes the body of the book. Is there anything more beautiful than following the work of an artist who inspires you? Feeling that it belongs to you? Sometimes I’ve thought that real art is like real love, with no pretenses, life metabolized. What does it mean to exist in this world? To be a mother, woman, lover? And beyond that, what does it mean to be a poet? How does a poet think? How do they love, and whom? Through what logic does a poet understand the world?
Taking up None of It Belongs to Me is taking up a life. We move from present to past, past to present, present to future, suspecting that the body is the only time machine. And its passage, or better said the perception of that, probably, is the sumun of poetry, the silent mechanism through which the real speaks.
In this book, poetic awareness pops out of the everyday like sparkles from an arid landscape, gleams on a classic car, a tin can in the sun. You can be in a bar holding a cup of coffee and travel to the geological strata under your table, travel through the years and the world, talk with a deceased friend, feel how life grows within a body, remember the early days of love and witness—in sum—the eternal sunshine of a brilliant mind.
—Marcelo Morales, author of The World as Presence/El mundo como ser
How long is a life, and how many lives do we live, in a day on Earth, in our ordinary bodies, afraid and in pain and in love? None of It Belongs to Me is full of the secrets that only poems can tell, the advice only poems can give. I loved this book for its distance and closeness, its billion-year view and its details. ‘This is the order of things. / First one thing, and then the other. / It's taken me a long time to understand this.’
—Elisa Gabbert, author of Normal Distance
Clarity and fluster, stacked up and toppling, startling lines, ordinary words. The poetry of Elizabeth Clark Wessel is one of my favorite conversations, and I am so—so—so jumped-up that this book is in the world.
—Daniel Handler, author of Bottle Grove
”In Elizabeth Clark Wessel's poetry, the world is realistic and yet completely unrecognizable. A woman moves around inside her home or through her city, preoccupied with the work of reproduction or human relations, thinking about death and cultural history. Everything is mundane and undramatic, but at the same time the boundaries between bodies dissolve and the proportions of things are distorted, beneath the calm lies the threat of disaster, and every gap might open up into an existential abyss. With subtle humor and a continual sensitivity to words, Clark Wessel translates between experience and language, between one language and another, and ultimately between an individual and her society. There are no reconciliatory syntheses in her poetry, only an intense and expansive view of the human condition and an infectious faith in literature's ability to reveal the world anew.”
—Athena Farrokhzad, author of White Blight/Vitsvit
About the author
Elizabeth Clark Wessel lives in Stockholm, Sweden and makes her living as a literary translator of Swedish fiction. She was born in rural Nebraska in 1980 and lived for many years in New York, where she pursued a BA at Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA at Columbia University. She’s the author of four chapbooks of poetry, most recently first one thing, then the other (Per Diem Press, 2019); her poems have also appeared in Fence, Boston Review, GUEST, the anthology Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, and elsewhere. In 2010, she co-founded Argos Books, which has been publishing innovative poetry books ever since.
