On a Clear Day

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. ON A CLEAR DAY, the second full-length book by Brooklyn- based musician, poet, and essayist Jasmine Dreame Wagner, looks toward horizons past and present, natural and synthetic, individual and communal. Over the course of this formidable project, readers are welcomed into a perspective refreshingly nuanced and unpretentious, particularly when it comes to those themes familiar to so many Americans--post-9/11 national identity, industrial detritus, the 20th Century's long goodbye, and the ever-present click-bait listicle. Wagner's keen eye for journalistic detail finds a brilliant counterpart in the inquisitiveness of her dynamic imagination, punctuating stretches of awestruck calm with pointed exclamations for action. Consisting of both lyric essays and poems, ON A CLEAR DAY is as concerned with blurring genres as it is with breaking away from their constraints--formally, as well as what readers expect of these genres, be it philosophical tract, memoir, or meditation. Wagner's writing can, in a blink, alternate from the noisiness of urban dwelling to melodic, high lyricism, capturing the rhythms of verse and bouncy optimism of contemporary ad language with ease. The effect of these tonal shifts and disparate genre combinations is often sublime, highlighting the astonishing intellect and skill of the author, while adding only more power to this singular text. Here is a book I did not know I had been waiting for. Here is a book in which documentation, poetry, criticism, memoir, and philosophy can come to collective life in a single unclassifiable breath, and intelligence and ineffability invite us into priceless, uneasy growth, one that moves in previously unsung directions. Jasmine Dreame Wagner does not dismiss the wound of discomfort and she does not turn away from the spectre of love. Written in the tradition of what it might mean to inhabit 'the gaze back, the return, my hands in the dirt, ' ON A CLEAR DAY is experiential and cerebral, gorgeous and accountable, stunning and eidetic.--Lo Kwa Mei-en