Boston Poems

Read Heather Clark's introduction to Boston Poems.

THIS BOOK SHIPS ON 10 OCTOBER

ISBN: 9780645761672

I’d never been to Boston when I started researching the city for my graduate studies. But when looking for connections between the American poets I adored, it always came back to this place and space. This historic city on a hill drew writers toward it like a beacon, and eventually it drew me there too.

The poems in this book were then born from the intersection of cobblestone and my developing consciousness, where the weight of history met the urgency of my present moments. Boston became both my muse and my mirror during the years I spent researching it, walking its streets, riding its trains, and absorbing the stories, dreams, and echoes of history that spilled from coffee shops and park benches, from redbrick homes and expansive college campuses.

What began as fragments scribbled in notebooks in jetlagged hazes grew into an extended love letter to a city that became my second home across a decade of arrivals and departures.

Writing these poems felt like archaeological work. I was uncovering layers of meaning beneath the familiar, but it was a process always complicated by the foreign perspective and family history I brought with me from Australia. This included my Indigenous heritage as well as the grief, depressions and anxieties I was navigating during parts of this time.

This collection spans seasons of presence and absence, of research and passion that brought me back, and then the personal tides that pulled me away. It is not just snapshots of what I saw in Boston, they’re also an attempt to capture the person I was becoming while learning to call it home.

–Sarah-Jane Burton