None of It Belongs to Me

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.