Reconciliations
Reconciliations explores the universal condition of grief through many forms of loss. St. Clair writes of the loss of a parent, first through adoption and the cultural and ancestral loss that follows, and then, in a powerful sequence of poems, of the loss of her birth father to addiction and death. She writes of the challenges of mothering her children as they become adults. She searches for the self as her marriage ends. In asking how to reconcile these losses, she learns that reconciliation begins with connections: with herself, her dead father, her children, her partner, and the world. These brave, honest poems don’t skim the surface; they search for deeper meaning, aiming toward the divine in nature and relationships, believing in love, hope, and renewal, and ultimately arriving at their own spirituality. They may range widely in length, style, and subject, but throughout, the poet’s voice is clear. Tinged with the bittersweet, grounded in place, St. Clair fearlessly seeks to make sense of her life through the twin lenses of curiosity and love, even in the midst of perpetual rain.
St. Clair’s poems explore what it means to claim a complicated lineage, one inflected with grief, and with rain, while also marked by moments of radiant joy. In the birth of stars, tsunami warnings, and in how one cell consumes another, the poems rename the familial and filial. With grace and curiosity, St. Clair’s work asks how we know who we belong to and offers a path to understanding “[w]hat should be renamed, or called again, or called new?”
– Annie Wenstrup, author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories
In this stunning new collection, Mistee St. Clair seeks to reconcile the immense joys of our world with its crushing losses, showing us how to live well on the earth, within our given and chosen families, and in our own fragile bodies. These poems balance a reverence for poetic craft with an urgent sense of narrative, resolving in the kind of deep wisdom, guidance, and comfort we so often turn to poetry for. Over four sweeping sections, St. Clair maps a universe of streets and homes, landscapes and family, memories and longings, contemplating what we inherit, what we pass down, and what we create in this “modest, honest world.” Her work walks in darkness and light with equally steady footing, guided by friendship and unconditional love, tuned into the cyclical echoes and shifts that move us through seasons and a human life. As I read Reconciliations, I frequently had to “place my hand on my chest / to hold my heart in,” so tender were its discoveries. In each section’s movement toward resolution, however, St. Clair deftly stitches me right up again, offering unparalleled insight and healing. I cherish this book and its revelations.
– Amanda Moore, author of Requeening
In Reconciliations, poet Mistee St. Clair grapples with identity— as daughter, mother, wife, and, perhaps most poignantly, as a person searching for the very origins of connection. The poems attend closely to the intertwined bonds of land and family, exploring them across shifting perspectives and moments in time. This is embodied grief work, alive to both messiness and wonder. It resists easy summary, instead dwelling in the vivid particulars that draw the reader back again and again.
– Erin Coughlin Hollowell, author of Every Atom and Corvus and Crater
This Morning is Different
This chapbook of poetry is set in a rich Alaskan landscape. Throughout these poems, place, weather, and nature are the vehicle through which family, motherhood, parenting, and marriage are explored. There is a sense of longing and loss, renewal and wonder, that leaves the reader wanting more.
In this new collection of poems, Mistee St. Clair yearns. In each poem we see a leaning toward the natural world, in both its darkness (“the sky an old brown bruise”) and in its light (“salted fish, clean and inviting”). This eco-poet puts the tastes, smells, and sounds of the wild world first, and allows her Alaskan landscapes to interpret the stories of her life. These poems are “tiny hearts, beating against our loose grip” and like a bird unexpectedly caught, we hold them, riveted.
– Emily Wall, Professor of English at the University of Alaska Southeast, and author of Flame and Liveaboard.
Within these pages, Mistee St. Clair grapples for footing in familiar, yet shifting, landscapes: parenting, adolescent transformation and Alaska’s increasingly erratic climate. “It’s the only way // to keep going. What we have is good / footing, enough anchors to hold.” A sense of vulnerability and longing pervades these poems and yet moments of inward retreat give way to the promise of seasonal emergence, of bloom. The give and take of marriage and mothering play out in unexpected ways, sharpening knives, climbing crabapple trees. The struggle is real, summers are brief but bright, winters begin in fall and are far too long. I expect those who spend time with Mistee St. Clair’s poems will find“a magnetic, familiar pulse.”
-Jonas Lamb, Poet & Associate Professor of Library & Information Science, University of Alaska Southeast
Mistee St. Clair 