Reviews of Clumsy
_______________________________________________________

“Claire Bateman’s speakers are experts in failure, and they often know how silly they look from a cautious pragmatic perspective. They know they look like misfits, bumbling around in a world of rationally explicable restraints—clumsy, whacked, but undaunted and weirdly cheerful. Like other transcendentalist poets, Bateman is most powerful and moving where she gives pain and folly their due, sustaining her readiness for marvelous breakthrough amid folly and pain. Indeed, her central intuition is that the interaction between two realities, rather than either reality in itself, is what makes life, as well as poetry, terrific.”

—Mark Halliday, from the foreword

Praise for Friction:

“A tremendous intelligence and wit is at work here, in lines and images so intricately delicious, so full in the mouth like grapes, so billowing and palpable at the same time, so expansively particular one feels restored to each ripe, riveting cranny of this phantasmagoric life.”

—Naomi Shihab Nye

Praise for The Bicycle Slow Race:

“Claire Bateman is a poet who savors the real world as well as the world we sense moving under it. She writes with clarity and power, and in these poems accomplishes what only the best poets can attempt. Poem after poem, with grace and imagination, she asks the right questions, identifies and explores the everyday mysteries that most of us don’t even notice.”

—David Bottoms