The poems in Alan Perry’s collection, The Heart of It, offer us far more than the sonic pleasures of stirring poetry—though they do swell with astounding music, too. These poems, each like a cut diamond, emanate a hard-won wisdom that dwells in the “liminal spaces” between moments, when Perry knows we are most present. His wide-ranging vision moves from exoplanets to the ordinary magic of watching a washing machine “pulsing dirt out of clothes.” This is a book to read and cherish over and over, until you have absorbed its most potent lesson: how to widen your eyes to this world we live in, and all the possible worlds beyond.
James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart and Turning Toward Grief
Throughout The Heart of It, time transforms creatures and the environment. A caterpillar spared by a human will become a moth while a crumbling walkway no longer serves as a path. Alan Perry closes the gap between the seemingly ordinary and the extraordinary by giving equal attention to laundry and the discovery of a new star, to a scribbled note from a spouse and a love poem hidden beneath an airplane seat cushion. This collection meditates on absence and mortality, but it doesn’t dwell in despair. Love is the act of being present, and these poems invite us to be present for transformative particulars of joy and loss.
Diane LeBlanc, author of The Feast Delayed
In his searching and poignant second chapbook, poet Alan Perry explores the inner and outer spaces of love. In The Heart of It, as he writes in “Voyager,” is the distant hope of love on some “rock in deep space,” to find someone “to breathe its thin atmosphere with me.” The poems are varied and far-ranging, as in “Cycles,” which begins with a washing machine, then makes you notice how sheets “wrap themselves around everything/like legs tangled in bed.” Like the poem by the same name, this collection is truly a “Tapestry” of love in all its pieces, “suspended like an intricate rug/that mixes each scrap of language.” As Perry reminds us, love can arrive unexpectedly, as in “Side Door,” and all you need to do is step through the door and stay.
Gene Twaronite, author of The Museum of Unwearable Shoes and Death at the Mall
“Clerk of the Dead”
Erudite, deftly crafted, memorable, thoughtful and thought-provoking verse, “Clerk of the Dead” is an extraordinary experience for anyone who appreciates the written word as a conveyor of emotions that are both intensely personal, yet universally experienced. Simply stated, Alan Perry’s “Clerk of the Dead” is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, community, college, and university library Contemporary American Poetry collections.
Online book review magazine “Wisconsin Bookwatch”, Oct. 2021
It was something of a treat to read Alan Perry’s Clerk of the Dead, a chapbook about the small or dying things we often ignore in the course of major events.
As the title suggests, this is a chapbook concerned with mortality. The title poem itself is a unique blend of entropy and bureaucracy that I found both humorous and edifying…
Benjamin Schmitt, Nov. 2020
Clerk of the Dead has the topical qualities of eclecticism, variety, the grab bag surprise and joy of not knowing what will happen when you turn the page, where you will find yourself… a fun read…
Cameron Morse, Oct. 2020
To read this collection is to find lines that are strikingly personal while speaking to the larger truths of human existence in a world where nothing is permanent. In this work, Perry has established himself as a poet with striking insight and an impressive ability to render life’s complexity into a handful of words.
Kameron Ray Morton, Aug. 2020
“Alan Perry has challenged our tangible concept of life and death, body and spirit, action and memory.”
“Pay attention, the writing is so graceful at times that you don’t even know exactly how it is you feel the way you do.”
Jeff Santosuosso, June 2020
Alan Perry’s poem “Closure” was featured in the January 2020 edition of “Winning Writers Newsletter”.
In Clerk of the Dead, Alan Perry works the seam between what was and what might have been; between wonder and the details that make our lives; between description and song. He’s a poet who knows that life is a commerce of much keeping and much losing. I am grateful for the gentle music he makes out of the way a body moves through its days; I am grateful for the invitation in these poems: to see, to hear, and to remember.
Tyler Meier, Executive Director, University of Arizona Poetry Center
“A Quiet Occurrence” first appeared in Issue 16 of Tahoma Literary Review. Many of us knew Mary Oliver’s work by the time of her passing in January 2019, and this gentle exploration by Alan Perry is dedicated to her memory. What first caught my attention is Perry’s approach in images, even as the lines in his work waterfall with a staggered indentation. This spacing acts much as the water in the poem, traveling slowly across the page with the sadness many of us felt in losing a poetic icon. But rather than end with irredeemable loss, “A Quiet Occurrence” centers each image in Oliver’s ability to find the unexpected in front of her, while simultaneously celebrating all that is still to come. Could there be a better way to honor her life than to remember that her words continue, in each of us?
Mare Heron Hake, Poetry Editor, Tahoma Literary Review
Alan Perry’s poems mean to jolt us awake by reminding us that paying attention is an act of generosity and devotion. His poems turn ordinary acts and words into sacraments. He grounds us in the daily, but takes us to the stars. He knows and listens with a tenderness and acuity that enlarges, reminding us to acknowledge one another’s existence as though we are as important to each other as we really are.
Juliet Patterson, author of “Threnody” and “The Truant Lover“
Alan Perry’s poems are—as he says at the end of the title poem—visitations, often to the dead or those entangled in disaster. Each accident and foreclosure is recorded in a manner befitting a Clerk of the Dead: precisely and without embellishment. What I found fascinating was the speaker’s encounter with Mary Oliver and Walt Whitman, both of whom bequeath gifts that result in (most appropriately) a most lovely and universal “Elegy.”
Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota Poet Laureate and author of “Carrying Water to the Field“
In Clerk of the Dead, Alan Perry combines two of a poet’s most potent varieties of magic—obsession and concision—to zero in on unresolved scenes from the past and present. What impresses me most about this moving debut collection is how Perry’s potentially muddy subject matter—memory, loss, and grief—is made crystalline through his vision.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, author of “Darwin’s Mother” and “Best Bones”
Clerk of the Dead named as a “writers success story”
University of Wisconsin-Madison Continuing Studies and instructor Angela Rydell
Alan Perry’s opening poem in The Heart of It, “Necessary Matter,” sets the scene of what one will encounter in his second chapbook: poems crafted with adroit metaphors illustrating the ordinary and extraordinary moments of life. As a bridge poem from his debut chapbook, Clerk of the Dead (Main Street Rag Press, 2020), Perry tells us we will find “the moment before absence,” often poignant and fleeting, that reveals the time where “there is no loss.”
Perry shows a certain noble audacity in claiming this moment and then lures us into his luminous, multi-layered poems, which substantiate his wisdom in naming the hard-to-express concepts he so deftly describes. These poems address simple moments: walking through an airport (“Baggage”) and combining two trees (“Grafting”) with gentle complexity. When read in measured time, we begin to see Perry’s specificity in his metaphors, leading us to his intended message through the turn of the poem to the ending, often a surprise eliciting a smile of delight.
Perry’s diction as he paints each detailed picture with language like “the freshness of outdoor freedom” (“Side Door”), and when a flock of flamingos’ “legs rudder their course” (“Descent”), shows the skill and creativity in these poems. In “Cycles,” the fabrics in the washing machine “lilt up and down.” Delicious.
Perry addresses some difficult subjects: partner abuse and denial (“Nick”), psychological shame and peer exclusion and how the speaker deals with it (“Svelte”), ever present death (“Out of Service” and “At the Cemetery”), and the existential threat and reality of climate crisis (“Descent,” “Encroachment,” “Some Call It a Sign”). He never leaves us without an anchor, and in many cases, shows us a way forward, the healing that is possible, and the presence of hope and love.
Perhaps the best gift of this new collection is how the poems often pique our curiosity, enticing us into our own imagination as we engage, providing an ending that gives us precious freedom to claim our own story within the one Perry crafts for us.
The Heart of It contains poems that draw us into the heart of loss, the act of being present, seeing more than the obvious, and the universal search for belonging and love, the way a prism rainbows light.
Give yourself the joy of a contemplative read of this collection and soak up how Perry draws you in with stories of ordinary lives and natural phenomenon, while delivering his masterful metaphors, subtle turns, and layered poems that surprise and satisfy. This book is a keeper.
Online book review in “Eclectica Magazine”, reviewed by Lisa Ashley
The poems in Alan Perry’s collection, The Heart of It, offer us far more than the sonic pleasures of stirring poetry—though they do swell with astounding music, too. These poems, each like a cut diamond, emanate a hard-won wisdom that dwells in the “liminal spaces” between moments, when Perry knows we are most present. His wide-ranging vision moves from exoplanets to the ordinary magic of watching a washing machine “pulsing dirt out of clothes.” This is a book to read and cherish over and over, until you have absorbed its most potent lesson: how to widen your eyes to this world we live in, and all the possible worlds beyond.
James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart and Turning Toward Grief
Throughout The Heart of It, time transforms creatures and the environment. A caterpillar spared by a human will become a moth while a crumbling walkway no longer serves as a path. Alan Perry closes the gap between the seemingly ordinary and the extraordinary by giving equal attention to laundry and the discovery of a new star, to a scribbled note from a spouse and a love poem hidden beneath an airplane seat cushion. This collection meditates on absence and mortality, but it doesn’t dwell in despair. Love is the act of being present, and these poems invite us to be present for transformative particulars of joy and loss.
Diane LeBlanc, author of The Feast Delayed
In his searching and poignant second chapbook, poet Alan Perry explores the inner and outer spaces of love. In The Heart of It, as he writes in “Voyager,” is the distant hope of love on some “rock in deep space,” to find someone “to breathe its thin atmosphere with me.” The poems are varied and far-ranging, as in “Cycles,” which begins with a washing machine, then makes you notice how sheets “wrap themselves around everything/like legs tangled in bed.” Like the poem by the same name, this collection is truly a “Tapestry” of love in all its pieces, “suspended like an intricate rug/that mixes each scrap of language.” As Perry reminds us, love can arrive unexpectedly, as in “Side Door,” and all you need to do is step through the door and stay.
Gene Twaronite, author of The Museum of Unwearable Shoes and Death at the Mall
“Clerk of the Dead”
Erudite, deftly crafted, memorable, thoughtful and thought-provoking verse, “Clerk of the Dead” is an extraordinary experience for anyone who appreciates the written word as a conveyor of emotions that are both intensely personal, yet universally experienced. Simply stated, Alan Perry’s “Clerk of the Dead” is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, community, college, and university library Contemporary American Poetry collections.
Online book review magazine “Wisconsin Bookwatch”, Oct. 2021
It was something of a treat to read Alan Perry’s Clerk of the Dead, a chapbook about the small or dying things we often ignore in the course of major events.
As the title suggests, this is a chapbook concerned with mortality. The title poem itself is a unique blend of entropy and bureaucracy that I found both humorous and edifying…
Benjamin Schmitt, Nov. 2020
Clerk of the Dead has the topical qualities of eclecticism, variety, the grab bag surprise and joy of not knowing what will happen when you turn the page, where you will find yourself… a fun read…
Cameron Morse, Oct. 2020
To read this collection is to find lines that are strikingly personal while speaking to the larger truths of human existence in a world where nothing is permanent. In this work, Perry has established himself as a poet with striking insight and an impressive ability to render life’s complexity into a handful of words.
Kameron Ray Morton, Aug. 2020
“Alan Perry has challenged our tangible concept of life and death, body and spirit, action and memory.”
“Pay attention, the writing is so graceful at times that you don’t even know exactly how it is you feel the way you do.”
Jeff Santosuosso, June 2020
Alan Perry’s poem “Closure” was featured in the January 2020 edition of “Winning Writers Newsletter”.
In Clerk of the Dead, Alan Perry works the seam between what was and what might have been; between wonder and the details that make our lives; between description and song. He’s a poet who knows that life is a commerce of much keeping and much losing. I am grateful for the gentle music he makes out of the way a body moves through its days; I am grateful for the invitation in these poems: to see, to hear, and to remember.
Tyler Meier, Executive Director, University of Arizona Poetry Center
“A Quiet Occurrence” first appeared in Issue 16 of Tahoma Literary Review. Many of us knew Mary Oliver’s work by the time of her passing in January 2019, and this gentle exploration by Alan Perry is dedicated to her memory. What first caught my attention is Perry’s approach in images, even as the lines in his work waterfall with a staggered indentation. This spacing acts much as the water in the poem, traveling slowly across the page with the sadness many of us felt in losing a poetic icon. But rather than end with irredeemable loss, “A Quiet Occurrence” centers each image in Oliver’s ability to find the unexpected in front of her, while simultaneously celebrating all that is still to come. Could there be a better way to honor her life than to remember that her words continue, in each of us?
Mare Heron Hake, Poetry Editor, Tahoma Literary Review
Alan Perry’s poems mean to jolt us awake by reminding us that paying attention is an act of generosity and devotion. His poems turn ordinary acts and words into sacraments. He grounds us in the daily, but takes us to the stars. He knows and listens with a tenderness and acuity that enlarges, reminding us to acknowledge one another’s existence as though we are as important to each other as we really are.
Juliet Patterson, author of “Threnody” and “The Truant Lover“
Alan Perry’s poems are—as he says at the end of the title poem—visitations, often to the dead or those entangled in disaster. Each accident and foreclosure is recorded in a manner befitting a Clerk of the Dead: precisely and without embellishment. What I found fascinating was the speaker’s encounter with Mary Oliver and Walt Whitman, both of whom bequeath gifts that result in (most appropriately) a most lovely and universal “Elegy.”
Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota Poet Laureate and author of “Carrying Water to the Field“
In Clerk of the Dead, Alan Perry combines two of a poet’s most potent varieties of magic—obsession and concision—to zero in on unresolved scenes from the past and present. What impresses me most about this moving debut collection is how Perry’s potentially muddy subject matter—memory, loss, and grief—is made crystalline through his vision.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, author of “Darwin’s Mother” and “Best Bones”
Clerk of the Dead named as a “writers success story”
University of Wisconsin-Madison Continuing Studies and instructor Angela Rydell
“The Heart of It”
Alan Perry’s opening poem in The Heart of It, “Necessary Matter,” sets the scene of what one will encounter in his second chapbook: poems crafted with adroit metaphors illustrating the ordinary and extraordinary moments of life. As a bridge poem from his debut chapbook, Clerk of the Dead (Main Street Rag Press, 2020), Perry tells us we will find “the moment before absence,” often poignant and fleeting, that reveals the time where “there is no loss.”
Perry shows a certain noble audacity in claiming this moment and then lures us into his luminous, multi-layered poems, which substantiate his wisdom in naming the hard-to-express concepts he so deftly describes. These poems address simple moments: walking through an airport (“Baggage”) and combining two trees (“Grafting”) with gentle complexity. When read in measured time, we begin to see Perry’s specificity in his metaphors, leading us to his intended message through the turn of the poem to the ending, often a surprise eliciting a smile of delight.
Perry’s diction as he paints each detailed picture with language like “the freshness of outdoor freedom” (“Side Door”), and when a flock of flamingos’ “legs rudder their course” (“Descent”), shows the skill and creativity in these poems. In “Cycles,” the fabrics in the washing machine “lilt up and down.” Delicious.
Perry addresses some difficult subjects: partner abuse and denial (“Nick”), psychological shame and peer exclusion and how the speaker deals with it (“Svelte”), ever present death (“Out of Service” and “At the Cemetery”), and the existential threat and reality of climate crisis (“Descent,” “Encroachment,” “Some Call It a Sign”). He never leaves us without an anchor, and in many cases, shows us a way forward, the healing that is possible, and the presence of hope and love.
Perhaps the best gift of this new collection is how the poems often pique our curiosity, enticing us into our own imagination as we engage, providing an ending that gives us precious freedom to claim our own story within the one Perry crafts for us.
The Heart of It contains poems that draw us into the heart of loss, the act of being present, seeing more than the obvious, and the universal search for belonging and love, the way a prism rainbows light.
Give yourself the joy of a contemplative read of this collection and soak up how Perry draws you in with stories of ordinary lives and natural phenomenon, while delivering his masterful metaphors, subtle turns, and layered poems that surprise and satisfy. This book is a keeper.
Online book review in “Eclectica Magazine”, reviewed by Lisa Ashley
The poems in Alan Perry’s collection, The Heart of It, offer us far more than the sonic pleasures of stirring poetry—though they do swell with astounding music, too. These poems, each like a cut diamond, emanate a hard-won wisdom that dwells in the “liminal spaces” between moments, when Perry knows we are most present. His wide-ranging vision moves from exoplanets to the ordinary magic of watching a washing machine “pulsing dirt out of clothes.” This is a book to read and cherish over and over, until you have absorbed its most potent lesson: how to widen your eyes to this world we live in, and all the possible worlds beyond.
James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart and Turning Toward Grief
Throughout The Heart of It, time transforms creatures and the environment. A caterpillar spared by a human will become a moth while a crumbling walkway no longer serves as a path. Alan Perry closes the gap between the seemingly ordinary and the extraordinary by giving equal attention to laundry and the discovery of a new star, to a scribbled note from a spouse and a love poem hidden beneath an airplane seat cushion. This collection meditates on absence and mortality, but it doesn’t dwell in despair. Love is the act of being present, and these poems invite us to be present for transformative particulars of joy and loss.
Diane LeBlanc, author of The Feast Delayed
In his searching and poignant second chapbook, poet Alan Perry explores the inner and outer spaces of love. In The Heart of It, as he writes in “Voyager,” is the distant hope of love on some “rock in deep space,” to find someone “to breathe its thin atmosphere with me.” The poems are varied and far-ranging, as in “Cycles,” which begins with a washing machine, then makes you notice how sheets “wrap themselves around everything/like legs tangled in bed.” Like the poem by the same name, this collection is truly a “Tapestry” of love in all its pieces, “suspended like an intricate rug/that mixes each scrap of language.” As Perry reminds us, love can arrive unexpectedly, as in “Side Door,” and all you need to do is step through the door and stay.
Gene Twaronite, author of The Museum of Unwearable Shoes and Death at the Mall
“Clerk of the Dead”
Erudite, deftly crafted, memorable, thoughtful and thought-provoking verse, “Clerk of the Dead” is an extraordinary experience for anyone who appreciates the written word as a conveyor of emotions that are both intensely personal, yet universally experienced. Simply stated, Alan Perry’s “Clerk of the Dead” is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, community, college, and university library Contemporary American Poetry collections.
Online book review magazine “Wisconsin Bookwatch”, Oct. 2021
It was something of a treat to read Alan Perry’s Clerk of the Dead, a chapbook about the small or dying things we often ignore in the course of major events.
As the title suggests, this is a chapbook concerned with mortality. The title poem itself is a unique blend of entropy and bureaucracy that I found both humorous and edifying…
Benjamin Schmitt, Nov. 2020
Clerk of the Dead has the topical qualities of eclecticism, variety, the grab bag surprise and joy of not knowing what will happen when you turn the page, where you will find yourself… a fun read…
Cameron Morse, Oct. 2020
To read this collection is to find lines that are strikingly personal while speaking to the larger truths of human existence in a world where nothing is permanent. In this work, Perry has established himself as a poet with striking insight and an impressive ability to render life’s complexity into a handful of words.
Kameron Ray Morton, Aug. 2020
“Alan Perry has challenged our tangible concept of life and death, body and spirit, action and memory.”
“Pay attention, the writing is so graceful at times that you don’t even know exactly how it is you feel the way you do.”
Jeff Santosuosso, June 2020
Alan Perry’s poem “Closure” was featured in the January 2020 edition of “Winning Writers Newsletter”.
In Clerk of the Dead, Alan Perry works the seam between what was and what might have been; between wonder and the details that make our lives; between description and song. He’s a poet who knows that life is a commerce of much keeping and much losing. I am grateful for the gentle music he makes out of the way a body moves through its days; I am grateful for the invitation in these poems: to see, to hear, and to remember.
Tyler Meier, Executive Director, University of Arizona Poetry Center
“A Quiet Occurrence” first appeared in Issue 16 of Tahoma Literary Review. Many of us knew Mary Oliver’s work by the time of her passing in January 2019, and this gentle exploration by Alan Perry is dedicated to her memory. What first caught my attention is Perry’s approach in images, even as the lines in his work waterfall with a staggered indentation. This spacing acts much as the water in the poem, traveling slowly across the page with the sadness many of us felt in losing a poetic icon. But rather than end with irredeemable loss, “A Quiet Occurrence” centers each image in Oliver’s ability to find the unexpected in front of her, while simultaneously celebrating all that is still to come. Could there be a better way to honor her life than to remember that her words continue, in each of us?
Mare Heron Hake, Poetry Editor, Tahoma Literary Review
Alan Perry’s poems mean to jolt us awake by reminding us that paying attention is an act of generosity and devotion. His poems turn ordinary acts and words into sacraments. He grounds us in the daily, but takes us to the stars. He knows and listens with a tenderness and acuity that enlarges, reminding us to acknowledge one another’s existence as though we are as important to each other as we really are.
Juliet Patterson, author of “Threnody” and “The Truant Lover“
Alan Perry’s poems are—as he says at the end of the title poem—visitations, often to the dead or those entangled in disaster. Each accident and foreclosure is recorded in a manner befitting a Clerk of the Dead: precisely and without embellishment. What I found fascinating was the speaker’s encounter with Mary Oliver and Walt Whitman, both of whom bequeath gifts that result in (most appropriately) a most lovely and universal “Elegy.”
Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota Poet Laureate and author of “Carrying Water to the Field“
In Clerk of the Dead, Alan Perry combines two of a poet’s most potent varieties of magic—obsession and concision—to zero in on unresolved scenes from the past and present. What impresses me most about this moving debut collection is how Perry’s potentially muddy subject matter—memory, loss, and grief—is made crystalline through his vision.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, author of “Darwin’s Mother” and “Best Bones”
Clerk of the Dead named as a “writers success story”
University of Wisconsin-Madison Continuing Studies and instructor Angela Rydell