Jesus in the Trailer is an intimate and sobering look at the South, at faith, at youth and aging. Clark’s poems are as tangible as red clay, with an appreciation for the rustic and a reverence for time. From start to finish, this is a truly captivating collection. You'll return to it again and again.

These poems pulse with conflict — desire and regret, tenderness and violence, hypocrisy and spirituality. “Red Lights” jolts us straightaway: “Sinister red Christmas lights/in the window…” Clark explores childhood trauma and sexual awakening, adult relationships, drug and alcohol abuse, and, ultimately, the sustaining grace of the natural world and love, as in “Frost Moon”: “where in the summer we lay/letting the green moss/grow over our bodies…” Deftly crafted and compellingly honest, Clark’s debut collection is impressive.

This is a work about moths, Savannah, teeth, Prince, lipstick, churches, tombstones, and everything in between. This is a poetry book that will take you places you don’t expect, with precise language. This is an author at the top of his talent, in beautiful form. This is a book for you.

This book of poems is an invitation to fall in love with the poet’s presence in his time and place; whether you are, or are not from the South, wishful or heart-broken.

Andrew K. Clark's Jesus in the Trailer is a work of brutal splendor, in which single pages carry the weight of whole novels and redemption flickers in the blood and hay of childhood memories. Clark sounds the gothic rhythms of old-time religion and devil's blues, alternately exhorting and confessing, calling us to burn bright and sleep deep -- to hold close the ones we hold dear.

Clark’s honed poems bite and leave us questioning our natures, we can’t hide in religious fervency or thru unzipped exploits. His poem Rebel Mama sears our conundrum, “and I know you, can’t get away from you.”