Sporadic Troubleshooting: Poems

“To read Clarence Major’s Sporadic Troubleshooting is to latch on to a Virgil of your own for a while. And your travels with him will invigorate and astound you.”–ROBERT WRIGLEY

“Quick-witted and wry (without being cynical), Clarence Major strikes me as eminently sane. In Sporadic Troubleshooting he wears his iconclasm lightly, occasionally wondering such things as how the swan (in ‘Leda and the Swan’) felt about being body-snatched by Zeus. Major passes from conundrum to conundrum without losing his cool. This is a voice we need to hear now.”–RAE ARMANTROUT

“Here are poems of precise portraiture (‘her life was hung/in pipe-and-flange armature’), landscapes both of urban grit and fabular zest; the characters, voices,and music of a lifetime of storytelling and lore. But Major is through and through a poet. Neither hero nor victim, he is instead a great companion–good-natured, agile, truth-telling, and gladly as capable of sure-footed steps forward as of jovial upending surprise.”–DAVID BAKER

“Clarence Major has written a timeless meditation on life and loss and the role of memory both in one’s personal life and in our collective lives. This is a book of elegy. That is to say that it has depth coupled with an urgency to recover a public world that must be also intimately felt. The turbulence throughout is lived and entirely real.”–PETER GIZZI