Music and Suicide

Author: Jeff Clark

Publisher: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (2005)

Jeff Clark's first collection, The Little Door Slides Back, was hailed as an unclassifiable classic in underground American writing: "A shadow world, seen by a visionary" (Rain Taxi); "a 120-page spell" (American Letters & Commentary); "a happy sadomasochism, a luxuriance of prurience" (Boston Review); "devoted to the idea of possibility in the poet who operates as free agent, looking to the weather not for the springs of dailiness but for some message from the aether" (Arras); "thick, purring music" (Rhizome).

In Music and Suicide, his second collection, Clark moves away from the sinisterism and mask-ridden black humor of his debut, into a present mazy with freed shadow, somatic magic, and post-suffocatory seeing.