The Clearing

Recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors’ Award, the Orlando Prize, and first place in Mid-American Review’s Fineline Competition, she holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Originally from central Pennsylvania, Allison Adair lives in Boston.

To Henri Cole: My heart is so full thanks to you. For selecting The Clearing from the many worthy manuscripts submitted this year, for your generous correspondence since, and even more for your own exquisite poems, please accept my deepest gratitude.

to Kim Garcia, Sue Roberts, and Skye Shirley, respectively, without whom there would be no book, no poems, no writing life.

Thank you to my former colleagues from Boston University, whom I miss, and to my current colleagues from Boston College, whom I cherish; to my students, a constant source of energy and purpose; and

your practical guidance, and your willingness to believe writing might be taught.

Thank you to Jean Sprackland and John McAuliffe for selecting “What Falls Behind” as one of the finalist-awardees of the 2015 Troubadour International Poetry Prize, and to Anne-Marie Fyfe for the poem’s subsequent publication.

Gratitude to the folks at Florida Review for honoring “Hitching” and “City Life” with the 2017 Editors’ Award and to Cheryl Boyce-Taylor for picking “Flight Theory” as winner of the 2015 Orlando Prize from the A Room of Her Own Foundation.

Thanks to Lindsay Hunter for choosing “Letter to My Niece, in Silverton, Colorado” as winner of Mid-American Review’s 2014 Fineline Competition.

Sincere gratitude to the editors and staff of the following journals, in which poems from this collection first appeared (occasionally in earlier versions):

American Poetry Review: “

Unambiguous. Red earth, green trees, white stars, and under it all: gold