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Chelsey Clammer’s Circadian equally delights the analyst and the poet in me. Clammer’s book is a lyric essay collection that draws on disciplines as diverse as biology, linguistics, genealogy, and nomenclature and combines them in unexpected ways to reevaluate her world and her place in it.

To my former landlady in Santa Cruz, I stole the seashells. It was an accident, the movers wrapping your basket of giant conus, conch and murex into boxes with my broken clamshells and scuffed sea glass from more northern shores. I still hold the conch to my ears, hear  the crashing sea. When you read …

Truth is a relationship, not a static group of fixed points. But so often poetry has been described as a beautiful illusion, a construction, and it helps me, as a writer, to think about honesty and accuracy much more than to think about making something beautiful. That also strikes me, right now, as radical—to find beauty in the attempt toward truth, not just in the attempt toward beauty.

I write because it’s how I respond to the world. Even little happenings keep me writing. I also write because I love language more than I can explain.

My husband and I work overseas, so we cannot help but be influenced by the people and places around us. Land is important to me, as is history and language.

In Chiem’s book, being a “private person” can happen when alone with someone who somehow speaks the same language as you, it can happen as a result of a joint smoked alone in an empty hallway, or it can happen when dancing to a Broken Social Scene song that plays over and over. It’s an intimacy all on its own.

You hear a ding and reach for your pocket. It’s a text or an email. Or perhaps a notification from Facebook telling you that someone “liked” something you wrote. It might be an Instagram photo from a vacationing friend, awash in golden light and sipping an early morning mimosa. It might even be your spouse, reminding you to pick up pet food on the way home.

This ding reaches you everywhere—messages, alerts, and texts floating into the palm of your hand at random. They interrupt thoughts, conversations, and musings—always tearing you back to a world that demands your response. Such is life in the 21st century, where everyone is only a thumb’s tap away.

The following poems were generated by workshops led by Underground Writing, a nonprofit organization that leads creative writing classes in migrant, incarcerated, recovery, and other at-risk communities in Northern Washington. I belong to this group.

Ever since I was born you’ve been there. You were there when my biological mom would relapse and let my sister and I run around free. You were there again as I began to realize how to work on my own and take care of my mom and little sister.

From a black nylon rope around
her neck hangs a silver instrument
bouncing on her tummy as she walks