Like Real People

by Tom Clark

Tom Clark’s  Like Real People  is a voyage into autobiography, one poet’s attempt to “tell his own life,” first in poetry, then in straightforward, unadorned prose.

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1995

About the author

Clark was an American poet, editor and biographer. Clark was educated at the University of Michigan and served as poetry editor of "The Paris Review" from 1963 to 1973 and published numerous volumes of poetry with Black Sparrow Press. His literary essays and reviews have appeared in "The New York Times," "Times Literary Supplement," and many other journals.

Reviews

[Lucas Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unrhymed sonnets, lyric poems, an odd Renaissance England interlude, and sixty pages of memoir make up Tom Clark's Like Real People. I throughly enjoyed this collection. Clark's poems are evocative and aphoristic and recount episodes from Clark's Chicago childhood exceptionally well. My only complaint might be the collections length. At 240 pages Like Real People began to drag around half way few and it took me a lot of work and not a few overlooked poems to get to the end. Still, recommended.

[Godine Publisher & Black Sparrow Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

Praise for Like Real People

Beautiful . . . Clark sets forth the conundrum of (auto)biography . . . and the mysterious way in which 'lost time' can be both gone and present, the inhabitants of that time (including the poet himself) both real and 'like' real people.
–– Alva Svoboda