Sugar House Review(s)

Auscultate

by Clayton Adam Clark

(Galileo Books, 2025) 

Reviewed by Jennifer Keith

Despite religious dogma to the contrary, Homo sapiens is a bloody punctuation mark at the end of the last word in the last sentence in the last paragraph on the last page in the last volume of the planet’s mega-Brittanica biography. With our impact on the planet, we may have already overstayed our welcome. The truth of humans as an ephemeral, invasive species is all over Clayton Adam Clark’s Auscultate, a collection of 38 poems from Galileo Press.  

The title refers to the act of listening to the heart with a stethoscope, an intimate diagnostic exercise that involves both touch and hearing. The imperative form is an invitation, or perhaps an order. Though hearts can signal sentiment, the heart of this book, arranged in four “chambers,” is anatomic, not emoji. Clark’s use of Latin and medical terms create a useful distance. While Auscultate offers glimpses of deep personal pain (the death of a friend’s mother inspires a number of poems, including the title piece), the book doesn’t ugly-cry.

The heart has two ventricles and two atria, and Clark’s poems are full of bifurcations, especially the dichotomy in choosing one impulse over another. Clark is deft at showing how those fateful binary decisions reverberate in other lives—or literally end them—for humans and other life forms. 

Those other life forms, Clark’s poems remind us, insist on taking up physical space. Encounters with nature become crises, hinges between brutality and mercy. Humans strike back at other species with pitchforks, tennis rackets, and neurotoxins or crush them against white drywall. Even a moment of pity for a worm besieged by ants in “Firebreak” is literally poisoned. In “Mousing,” compassion degrades into a practical numbness—having a heart is hard when modern life’s distractions are so ready to relieve you of the task. 

Speeding motor vehicles (“glass-and-metal crypt[s]”) compress time and force disastrous decisions by humans and other species. In “The Missouri,” a car-crash survivor makes a split-second choice between two fates and in “Flight Theory,” Clark’s driver is recalibrating fight or flight impulses in himself facing a charging dog while acknowledging the mutilation of a deer by a charging automobile.

    […] But you’re still

    surprised how far you must drive

    to find the roughed-up pieces

    and the head upturned on

    the shoulder, as if it never saw

    anything but ahead, or even if

    you can find time for second thought,

    you haven’t the space for change.

The driver in “Attrition” slows down on the road to his mother’s house so that if a deer must die, it won’t be by his car. But another driver doesn’t: "someone who still needs / the yellow sign with a bounding cartoon / buck to perceive their hazard."

 

Technically, the poems are heterogenous. Clark leans into iambic lilt and full-blown sonnet form on occasion, but it’s clear he lets each piece be what it wants. Both his free-verse and formal poems feel natural. He’s not shoe-horning his meanings into form in poems such as “Caprinae,” (a stealthy sonnet), “Figure II,” and others. 

Likewise, Clark’s free verse mostly avoids deconstructing for the hell of it, even if, in spots, the abstraction feels a little forced, such as in “Sleepwalk Mannerisms.” He’s taking cues from Francis Bacon, the subject of several of the ekphrastic poems in Auscultate. Clark’s visions of Earth’s human occupation, in all its meaty grotesquery, are dashed out on the page with the color and energy of Bacon’s expressionism.  

Physically, the book is curious. The cover art is colorful and oddly cheery, while the back cover includes a quote that hints what kind of “heart” is explored within. But there aren’t any blurbs, which is surprising. Most of the comprising poems have been published in journals and it is hard to imagine Clark’s work evading the eye of accomplished poets, whose words on the back cover could help get the book into more hands. 

In auscultation, the part of the stethoscope that touches the skin and transmits the sound is called the bell. The poems of Auscultate reverberate, toll, and warn. What flows through the book’s four chambers is warm, sticky—here: fire-bright with oxygen; there: dusky and choked dark without; everywhere: an indelible, brilliant stain.

Jennifer Keith’s poems and reviews have appeared in Sewanee Review, Able Muse, The Free State Review, Fledgling Rag, Best American Poetry 2015, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. Keith was a finalist in the 2021 Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. A chapbook, Truant Season, came out on Apathy Press Poets in 2022, and her first full-length book of poems, Terminarch, was chosen by David Yezzi for the 2023 Able Muse Book Award. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.