Olivia Clare’s delightfully strange and tender debut collection traces the impact of larger-than-life forces on everyday people. From siblings whose relationship is as fragile as glass, to a woman grappling with both an emotional and physical drought, to a superstitious spouse fearful of misfortune, Disasters in the First World explores the real and the imagined, environmental and man-made calamities, and the human need to comprehend the unknown. In “Pittsburgh in Copenhagen,” a man and a woman confront infidelity and estrangement as they share one last night together. “Pétur” tells the tale of a son who takes his mother on an Icelandic vacation only to be stranded there by a volcanic eruption. “Rusalka’s Long Legs” follows a young girl’s treacherously long walk through the woods with her unpredictable mother. And in “The Visigoths,” an older sister finally breaks through to her idiosyncratic brother. With precision and grace, the thirteen stories in this collection capture the fragility of troubled lives caught in disrupted turbulence, moments of connection―no matter how fleeting. Through these intimate, profoundly moving worlds, Clare’s voice rises as a distinctive new American storyteller.

Disasters in the First World: Stories

Literature & Fiction

Clare, Olivia

United States

Grove Press/ Black Cat

Arm Fixed To A Wing

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press

Poetry. "Olivia Clare keeps what Emily Dickinson called 'Esoteric Time.' In the title poem, a dark berceuse, the hour is 'black bear o'clock, ' a spell beyond tell-able time for which not even the 26 letters of the alphabet, evoked by the title, are a guaranteed talisman. 'Cryonics' admonishes a depressed friend, 'caught / in an hourglass neck / of cells not dividing, ' to 'revive: / child the father / of the sand.' References to seconds, minutes, hourglasses, sands, clocks, gnomon, dials, and all manner of measuring, counting, and 'telling' time abound, as the speaker, with widdershins pluck, provocatively reverses, transgresses, and teases such limitations to fashion worlds that exempt themselves from any static or linear notion of past, present, future, or place. By attempting to word this ineffable, manifold 'within' time, Clare conjures a cosmological wunderkammer, '[k]indred, in a flickering place.'" Lisa Russ Spaar"

The 26-Hour Day (First Book)

Poetry

New Issues Poetry and Prose

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Books by Clare, Olivia