The Necessary Impossibilities of Poetry (on Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin; Dorothy Barresi’s What We Did While We Made More Guns; Analicia Sotelo’s Virgin; and Kevin Prufer’s How He Loved Them)

Kevin Clark’s third volume of poems, The Consecrations (2021), is published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press. His second book, Self-Portrait with Expletives (2010), won the Pleiades Press prize. Clark’s poetry appears in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. A frequent critic for The Georgia Review, he has also published essays in The Southern Review, Papers on Language and Literature, and Contemporary Literary Criticism.