“What strange, off-kilter, brilliant poems Charlie Clark has written. The inhabitants of this book live in worlds that mostly resemble our own, if it weren’t for those men sprouting wings, or the rings wrenched around the moon, or that sixteen-year-old boy scrawling Kierkegaard on the bathroom wall. Witty, inventive, and graceful, these poems crackle with energy. But beneath that energy lives the real stuff of poetry—longing, fear, rage, lovely suffering—keenly felt, made whole in language.”
—Kevin Prufer
“Charlie Clark’s remarkable The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin is a book so full of ‘fresh, blunt wonder’ and ‘compilations’ of delicious noticings, of energetic reports, so full of the passion, movement, and invention Berryman required of poetry that I felt as if I truly was experiencing the world in a new way. Clark’s idiom is dexterously off-kilter, his images rich and brightly focused, and his ear pitched precisely to the way we think as well as hear. But perhaps what I admire most about Clark’s museum of ruin is its vast inventory of affection which he’s created out of a rare and infectious love of the world, a world in which he asks ‘Gentle, brightness’ to burn him ‘into singing.’”
—Michael Collier