An aching meditation on the cyclical nature of grief and memory's limited capacity to preserve everything time takes from us.How does one make sense of loss--personal and collective? When language and memory are at capacity, where do we turn? Confronted with "a year meant to end all / those to come," acclaimed poet Adam Clay questions whether anything is "wide enough to contain what's left / of hope." In the absence of a clear way forward, the poems of Circle Back wander grief's strange and winding path. Along the way, the line between reality and dreams blurs: cows stare with otherworldly eyes, 78s play under cactus needles, a father becomes his own child, and the dead become something more complicated--a "sketch turned to painting / left in a room dusty from / lack of passing through."But amidst these liminal landscapes, a "thread of promise" persists in poetry. As flawed as language is, we still turn to it for longevity, for love, like "Keats, / sketching himself back into place." Vulnerable and nuanced, Clay details the difficult work of healing--and in doing so, captures those needful moments of reprieve in grief's "strange circle." Two friends dashing through a sprinkler. A garden of startled birds. Out for a run some gray morning: a sudden patch of wildflowers. Circle Back is a bared heart, one readers will find as thoughtful as it is tender.

The distilled, haunting, and subtly complex poems in Adam Clay's A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World often arrive at that moment when solitude slips into separation, when a person suddenly realizes he can barely see the place he set out from however long ago. He now sees he must find his connection back to the present, socially entangled world in which he lives. For Clay, reverie can be a siren's song, luring him to that space in which prisoners will begin "to interrogate themselves." Clay pays attention to the poet's return to the world of his daily life, tracking the subtly shifting tenors of thought that occur as the landscape around him changes. Clay is fully aware of the difficulties of Thoreau's "border life," and his poems live somewhere between those of James Wright and John Ashbery: they seek wholeness, all the while acknowledging that "a fragment is as complete as thought can be." In the end, what we encounter most in these poems is a generous gentleness--an attention to the world so careful it's as if the mind is "washing each grain of sand."

This book deals with the connections between topology and ordered groups. It begins with a self-contained introduction to orderable groups and from there explores the interactions between orderability and objects in low-dimensional topology, such as knot theory, braid groups, and 3-manifolds, as well as groups of homeomorphisms and other topological structures. The book also addresses recent applications of orderability in the studies of codimension-one foliations and Heegaard-Floer homology. The use of topological methods in proving algebraic results is another feature of the book. The book was written to serve both as a textbook for graduate students, containing many exercises, and as a reference for researchers in topology, algebra, and dynamical systems. A basic background in group theory and topology is the only prerequisite for the reader.

Stranger is a book of both great change and deep roots, of the most rich elements of the earth and the instability of a darkening sky. The third collection by Adam Clay dives into a dynamic world where the only map available is "not of the world / but of the path I took to arrive in this place, / a map with no real definable future purpose." Tracing a period of great change in his life--a move, a new job, the birth of his first child--Clay navigates the world with elegance and wonder, staring into the heart of transition and finding in it the wisdom that "Despite our best efforts to will it shut, / the proof of the world's existence / can best be seen in its insistence, / in its opening up." By firmly grasping on to the present, the past and the future collapse into the lived moment, allowing for an unclouded view of a way forward.

Written after years of on the job training with the author's four children, The Energy Thief is an entertaining children's bedtime story that reveals the true source of children's unbridled energy. In the book, an obviously exhausted father is putting his child to bed and sharing the secret of this very active child's energy- it is stolen from his parents. Illustrated by Lincoln Adams in a style all his own- the images hold the attention of the child, while the text is amusing to parents and child alike. Most importantly, the story shows the love between parent and child, while retaining a sense of humor.

Poetry. Rich in river imagery and an intense sense of the passage of time, THE WASH explores the incessant music that permeates journeys with a destination unknown. Interweaving the voices of John Clare, Audubon, Roethke, and others, the poems depict a landscape of loss in which language and images provide the only concrete platform on which to stand. Ending with an elegy for the self-portrait and an acceptance of the inevitability of decay, the speaker discovers "the stillness of frames both comforts and terrifies." Playing a lyrical voice against the limits of silence, THE WASH uncovers the voices that can be made, and heard, in and out of nature.