Why read The Blue Clerk?

Book cover of The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos

Book description

On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink-blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet’s accumulated left-hand pages—the unwritten, the withheld, the unexpressed, the withdrawn, the restrained, the word-shard. In The Blue Clerk renowned poet Dionne Brand stages a conversation and an argument between the…

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Poetry

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Blue Clerk as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Laura Raicovich

Author

I love this book. Dionne Brand conveys what it means to write through a crystalline web of ideas, poetry, and philosophy. Her profound, evocative, and real tale of imagined conversations between a poet and the clerk charged with dealing with their output is simultaneously familiar and fantastical. I got lost in the beauty of language only to be jolted into the realities of the world as it exists in all its beauty and awfulness.

From Laura's list on The best books to reimagine the present.