HANDTYPE PRESS: Suddenly Slow

Suddenly Slow: Poems.
John Lee Clark.
32 pages.
5.5" x 8.5" paperback.
ISBN: 978-0-9798816-1-9

SOLD OUT.
(It's sadly out of print.)

This collection of poems opens with a stumble: "It was not there / until I tripped over it."

But this is fitting because John Lee Clark bounces back, as he always does, artfully and unexpectedly, to make an astonishing statement. Snowballs, his long white cane, pears, Braille, bedsheets, sign language, and even morning light come alive in this deaf-blind poet's hands like they have never before.

Thanks to his sparkling language, his intellectual playfulness, and his capacity for wonder, together with his unique perceptions of life, his poems add a much-needed new wrinkle to the lexicon of imagination. What he reflects on, others cannot see in the same way again, and that includes the poet himself: We understand that he is like the rest of humankind in all the most important ways.

Read the sample poem "Something to Sleep On" here!

And here's what some of his contemporaries have to say about this collection:

"This evocative collection of poems opens us to the question: What makes a world? John Lee Clark is making sense of a world that comes to him differently. All we need do is place our trust in the crook of the arm of this DeafBlind poet; he then leads us into a world where 'there is no answer in sight.' This is a world of broadened vision emerging from narrower sight, of heightened passion blossoming from experience at a slower pace. Each lyric along the journey into this poet’s 'kind of light' rewards our trust." —Morgan Grayce Willow, author of Arpeggio of Appetite

"I am honored to count John Lee Clark among my contemporaries in the poetry of the DeafBlind community. He writes such thoughtful, such fine poems that I really think everybody —everybody— will enjoy them." —Doug Milligan, author of Dark-Silence

"The poems in this delicious collection are heartbreakingly beautiful. There are double layers and more of meaning in metaphors, in quick-minded word play and in the skill with which Clark describes the world as he 'sees' it. But even better than these brilliant uses of our language are his tales of the heart in all of its vagaries, sorrows, and joys. They shine with humanity." —Pia Taavila-Borsheim, author of Moon on the Meadow