Temporary Shelters

by Grant Clauser 

(Cornerstone Press, 2025) 

Reviewed by Robert Fillman

Part elegy, part warning, part call to action, part escape, the temporary shelters Grant Clauser creates in his poetry offer “momentary stays,” to borrow Robert Frost’s phrase. And readers could do worse than to take up residence inside these poems.

Clauser writes with reverence for the earth and the diversity of life it sustains. The evidence in Temporary Shelters is abundant: “Marigolds,” “Planting Strawberries,” “The Glaciers,” “Weeping Willow,” “Box Turtles,” “Sycamore”—the list goes on. Because Clauser so fully engages non-human nature, one might assume that he dips into a well of familiar symbols. But that could not be further from the truth. Like the world that inspires him, Clauser reveals how the everyday—a creek, a nuthatch, a sunflower—can still be encountered with awe, observed from a fresh vantage. What is so refreshing is how Clauser rouses the reader out of ourselves and into the miracle of what surrounds us. He is a tour guide. He is a sage. But most importantly, he is attuned to the senses, and through his expansive and sharp eye for bare life, our own are heightened. 

The collection opens with “NASA Announces Plans for a Peopled Mission to Mars.” While the title suggests the promise of exploration through space travel, the poem itself is far from optimistic about what this means. Clauser focuses instead on earthly details—a “perfect” brook trout and the “rust red / stripe on a salamander’s back,” “how hard this trout fought” to stay alive. He laments the daily erosion of the natural world: “every day / something beautiful is disappearing.” For Clauser, the earth is “dying under our feet,” and the impulse to flee it—to abandon rather than revere the planet we have damaged—becomes the poem’s quiet indictment of our species. Like he says: “Every day another piece of hope / is bleached or broken or hunted / into history.”

There are also many moments of tenderness in Temporary Shelters. By the end of the volume, readers can be assured they will find themselves feeling closer to their loved ones, their pets, their homes. “Blessings of a Dog,” for example, draws us into an ordinary scene of playful affection between a pet and her human. It is the precision of the verbs that brings the moment alive: chases, dives, slides, trots, asks, gnaws. The puppy feels so near that we seem to be standing in the kitchen alongside her. Yet, a sense of foreboding pervades the interaction—the knowledge of the creative-destructive cycle:

    She’s still a pup, has enough play in her

    for twelve years or so. I know how that goes. 

    You love, they love. Everything goes on 

    like it should until it doesn’t. 

A lesser poet might stop here, at the edge of sentimentality. But Clauser does not. Instead, the poem widens its lens: “She doesn’t / know there’s something broken in the world / that a ball can’t fix.” What follows is more devastating still, and best left for readers to encounter on their own—to feel the distant weight of tragedy bearing down as it creeps closer.

As readers will see, every poem features sure-handed lines that speak with authority, though often on life’s inevitable mutability and to a past that feels close yet remains impossibly out of reach. In “Watching a Flying Squirrel,” the poet finds a fitting analogue for the human condition: “Life is risk, and love too.” And it is the nimble precision of the poem’s metaphors that animates its momentum: 

    When my daughters 

    were born my wife and I imagined

    branch after branch for years within reach,

    not the ones we fell short

    or that left us hanging by a claw.

Formally, the enjambment—the fluid movement of memory itself—carries each detail down the page with the care and alertness of an animal instinctively aware that one wrong move can cost everything. 

Again and again, Clauser leads us into the heart of things. Sometimes that heart is a crumbling structure in the woods, as in “Gunpowder Homestead,” where “ghosts may come and go / like hummingbirds in the afternoon.” This is a story we know: of arrival and departure, of human lives that leave behind “ruins on the one hand, / succession on the other.” What remains is taken back by the natural world—by the coming of spring, by a rising creek, by the steady march of time. Clauser reminds us: for that person, a family, or lineage, to secure a life meant “breaking / oneself against the land until it breaks.” Eventually, the stone walls become grave markers, mere evidence that someone once settled there. And if we are fortunate, the earth is still able to reclaim what human lives once transformed and dominated. 

 

Beyond the physical losses etched into history and the land, Clauser turns to quieter, more internal forms of loss that take place within the self. “Epistemology II” takes us into the digital age, a time when we are shoring up the ruins of our own minds. Here, Clauser recognizes the whittling away of attention spans and those moments when we long to disconnect, to “just be satisfied, at least / for a little while,” perhaps finding solace in the simple comfort of “a dog pressed / against my leg, not worrying / about how long this will last.”  

The end of the collection is elegiac in nature. “Taking Down the Lights” begins: “Every celebration has to end, / lest we get too easy with joy.” In a poem centered on the traditional act of taking down decorations after the holiday season has passed, Clauser opens things outward: “Each year feeds into the next / like small rivers flowing / into larger ones.” In doing so, he moves the reader from the ordinary rhythms of clock time into a deeper, more subjective experience of living. We feel the gravitas of the everyday—the residue of what we touch and carry with us. This poem isn’t merely about “pull[ing] the wires off / the eaves”; it’s about thinking beyond calendrical dates and recognizing that our complicated existence persists across generations, across eons. We experience life and death, joy and sadness, light and darkness. It is this honoring of ebb and flow that gives Clauser’s verse its urgency and relevance beyond these immediate, turbulent days. 

External reality might tell us that we are all, in effect, doomed passengers on a sinking ship veering toward climate collapse. But internally, we have to know that we can still contribute—that if we can’t save ourselves, we may yet save others—and preserve the planet for future generations. Grant Clauser’s Temporary Shelters gives us a place to rest, to look inward, to reassess, and to change. It gives us a space to do nothing but think and feel, which is what humans do best.

Robert Fillman is the author of House Bird (Terrapin Books, 2022), the chapbook November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019), and his most recent collection The Melting Point (Broadstone Books, 2025). He has received prizes from Sheila-Na-Gig online, Third Wednesday, and The Twin Bill for select poems. He has been a finalist for the Cider Press Review Book Award, the Gerald Cable Book Award, the Sandy Crimmins Prize in Poetry, and the Ron Rash Award in Poetry. Individual poems have appeared in The Hollins Critic, Nashville Review, Paterson Literary Review, Pembroke Magazine, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and others.

 

Quarantine Highway

by Millicent Borges Accardi 

(FlowerSong Press, 2022) 

Reviewed by David E. Poston

In her endnotes to Quarantine Highway, Millicent Borges Accardi explains that it was “written during early and mid-pandemic months,” often from the 30 by 30 writing challenge organized by Juan Morales for CantoMundo fellows. During that dark time, Accardi writes that poetry “drew us close, reunited our spirits and held our souls safely within our own and each other’s isolation.” About three dozen of these poems are inspired by poems or lines from other poets, most from members of the CantoMundo community, including founders Carmen Tafolla, Deborah Paredez, Norma Cantu, and Celeste Guzmán Mendoza. 

These poems are often-painful reminders of the pandemic’s toll on our mental and social health, one still manifested in isolation and disconnection. The opening poems are peppered with words such as terrifying, fearful, and weak-kneed, with images of desperately dancing the Vira de Roda. The poem “Bread” describes a world where the onslaught of “an unseen war criminal” meant that suddenly “life was forbidden and/everyone was an enemy.” Similar images of disorientation and anxiety are found in “We Still are not Breathing.”  

There is a disorienting quality to Accardi’s syntax as well: halting, incoherent, vague, lacking in time cues, shifting abruptly, changing or omitting referents, oddly capitalized. In the fever dream of COVID isolation, the poem “We’ll Come Down Close Behind” begins 

    And such and we have

    and we need and we want

    and we have and if it happens,

    we couldn’t leave, and there is not a

    never in the universe except now.

In the lines that complete the poem, a variety of plaints blur into a rush of feelings that overburden the strictures of language: 

    And such and such and the homeless,

    and prisons, and why can’t I

    leave my home without a mask.  

    We’d come down close behind

    In the middle of a crowd, as if we

    mattered and as if things were

    normal rather than a new normal,

    which is odious. Then, then, and then

    and could. 

Then, beautifully, the outpouring of negative emotions turns to poems recalling memories and feelings that ring true to the experience of all of us, for good or ill, as if they were rising to haunt one in a dream. “For Truth would be from a Line,” for example, recreates a time when the world seemed controlled and ordered,

    like a poem dealing with

    trees I memorized, along with everyone

    else in Mrs. Virtue’s first grade

    at Luther Burbank,

    where the teacher handed out

    pastel marshmallows 

    when we behaved.

“The Right Measure of their Agony” describing days when:

        We held spiders

    And drank home-brewed absinthe as if we

    Were characters in 1920s Hemingway. We agreed

    to the word double-life as we ventured on the fire escape

    and we were solid, unbreakable and under the age of 30,

    with that unfinished feeling that troubled us,

    like not knowing your lucky number.

The next poem, “And Admits,” recalls:

    [ … ] rolling down the street

    Listening to Beethoven

    And drumming the side of the open

    Window with our feet

    Hanging outside

    As we turned through the fields of

    Almond groves stupidly

    being

The lens of the pandemic allows both poet and reader to see what is most meaningful and dear about these experiences. “With Cascading, Iron Straight Hair” describes familiar teenage angst, with Accardi’s added perspective of being the other:

The smooth dexterity

looking forward to an open gate for a place I never went to,

a Friday dance gymnasium with a fancy backless dress

my parents cannot buy.

The charm of sweet conflict, snarled waves,

my Portuguese frizz waves, a divorce of emotions between what

I see in the locker and who I see far away

in the pages of Seventeen magazine, near

from the teenage experience of greatness, charity,

a catalog of friends I could never connect with. 

Other poems go deeper into the complexities faced by children of immigrants, by Latinx persons, by all persons of color. One that I read and reread, even as others treated the same theme, was “Unlearning America’s Languages,” which ends:

Parents came to California to rise above while

blending inside a fairytale Knott’s Berry Farm where

Old McDonald feeds the chicken and a city where

kids ride bikes and play Pong. It was sleep

and rise and keep damn quiet about anything

different. Tell the counselor you will ride the bus

and stave off the earthquakes, embracing a future

that does not resemble any past you heard whispered

and fought about at night after bedtime

“All Unwavering Survivors,” one of several ekphrastic poems, exemplifies that trust in the value of one’s experience and the artistic cross-fertilization that energizes this collection. The title comes from a line in Gloria Amescua’s poem “Chanclas, Find Our Ground." Amescua won the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge in March of 2017 with her response to Lisa Ortega’s collage entitled "La Familia." The line from which Accardi draws her title captures the image of the family in the piece: “All unwavering survivors, nameless faces, amid the turbulence of politics that can cut them apart like paper dolls.” Anyone who is at all acquainted with chanclas culture knows the formidable spirit it represents. As Accardi writes, this spirit is “unconditional and sudden,” this family is “remarkable for their stillness and fury” even if “they are outside / a long solo flight of music, / set apart, detained, locked up.”

The conversation that Amescua began with the Lisa Ortega piece is further expanded by the Accardi poem. Another expansion happens in the poem “Holy Waters Heal the Border Scar.” That poem’s title comes from Norma Cantu’s poem “Border Bullets” and like Cantu’s poem treats of the precious cargo that mothers bear on their hips across the Rio Grande in search of a better life.

Similarly, Accardi’s “The Poor Kid with Something to Prove” takes Diego Báez’s poem “American Marine” and extends the source poem into a vivid portrayal of what drives the title character. Borges describe him as “the serenity prayer come to life, the punk with no attitude,” as someone “tight, like a hand-rolled cigarette, someone “solely glorious-rare and in the pocket moment of be here now.” He represents all those “boys who are full of promise,” who are on “the true-larger, needlessly-bold pathway to forever.” Accardi presents this indomitable, indelibly described young man as an exemplar of the spirit that drives one to survive a pandemic, an oppressive system, the journey to find a better life in a strange land.

So where does Quarantine Highway lead us? 

The isolation of quarantine leads the mind to dark places, as in poems such as “While I Count Like I Have Practiced.” That poem draws its title from Raina Leon’s poem about the smothering effects of pervasive racism, “Poetry Anxiety Disorder” and asks “How can we be strong and vibrant when we are not?” The ways we were told to cope with the pandemic—to tolerate rules, to stay in line—remind the speaker of all the lines and borders she has been told not to cross and of the lines she sees on her own face.

But these poems led me to the vibrant, beautiful, and multi-faceted CantoMundo community, founded in 2009 and inspired by the models of Cave Canem and Kundiman. In a 2017 interview for the NEA with Autasia Ramos, co-founder Deborah Paredez was emphatic about the CantoMundo commitment to fostering poetry communities—plural—recognizing the many communities of Latinx poets and the many connections with other poetic and artistic communities. I was welcomed into the currents and crosscurrents of the conversations between these poets and artists.

In one of the last poems, “One Season, my Father Leases Land to Grow Fresno Sweet Red Onions,” Accardi refers to the poem “Onions,” by Juan Luis Guzmán. That poem begins by describing hands carefully lifting onions from the soil, then connects that experience with the speaker’s memory of “pulling out my naked self” while swimming with a girl. Accardi’s poem begins:

    Reading this, I cook Fresno peppers into Piri Sauce,

    red melting the spice to the Portuguese catch-all phrase

    for adding a teaspoon of red flavor into cooking.

    The deception of hot, couched into sweetness

    Mixed among red onions.

    We see the vivid color and forget the trouble

    we are going through endured in the sweet-hot flavor.

    Quarantine, not so unbearable when there is beautiful. 

In a time of unconscionable treatment of immigrant communities, these poems could not be more vital. Through empathy, through memory, through words, through communities, Millicent Borges Accardi shows us how the beautiful we share could bring us all through the seemingly unbearable.  

David E. Poston's poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in North Carolina Literary Review, Pedestal, Cider Press Review, Bull, MoonShine Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is the author of three poetry collections, including Postmodern Bourgeois Poetaster Blues, which won the North Carolina Writers' Network's Randall Jarrell Chapbook Competition. A fourth poetry collection, Letting Go, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press.