"The poems in Adair's debut draw on folklore and the animal world to assert feminist viewpoints and mortal terror in lush musical lines, as when 'A fat speckled spider sharpens / in the shoe of someone you need.'"-New York Times Book Review, "New & Noteworthy Poetry"

"Astonishing and luminous . . . [The Clearing] is an alchemical feat, turning horror into beauty as Adair reveals what surges beneath-the violence, want, grief, thrill, and nameless fury."-Boston Globe

"Adair considers in her imaginative debut the intersection of human and animal life, closely examining the experience of womanhood. . . . Like Grimms' fairy tales, Adair's poems are dark without being bleak, hopeless, or disturbing. Readers will find the collection's lush language and provocative imagery powerfully resonant."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Masterful . . . Juxtaposing somber images from the natural world (a runt rabbit, a strangled swan, a floor of dead birds, a landscape made of a woman's hair) against seemingly more durable material like bones, chicken wire, rifles, and coins, Adair's poems take as their central subject emotional and physical violence against women, which in this collection distorts all of life's natural processes."-Literary Hub, "Best New Books to Read This Summer"

"The opening poem in the collection feels like a fable and nightmare; a scene out of time. 'We'll write this story again and again, // how her mouth blooms to its raw venous throat-that tunnel / of marbled wetness, beefy, muted, new pillow for our star // sapphire, our slugging prospecting-and how dark birds come / after, to dress the wounds, no, to peck her sockets clean.' We leave the poem a little scared, a little curious, and certainly more aware: The Clearing meditates on what is asked of women, and what is taken from them."-The Millions, "Must-Read Poetry: June 2020"

"Adair is capable of a lush lyricism whose beauty is impartial, lighting up the junk of a region, a culture, and a family, its toxic heritage of violence and violation, while haloing the uncluttered space that remains after the mess has been cleared away."- Los Angeles Review of Books

"Electric, brilliant with loss and searching . . . As we read, we are on a journey into the woods with strangers, and The Clearing's poems capture the beauty and terror of sudden, new site-lines."-Colorado Review

"It's difficult to believe that The Clearing is Adair's first full collection of poems. Her once-upon-a-times are generational oral histories, from the Civil War to present day. They will endure, even as the land and these people endure, despite the violence done to it and them, despite the attempts to silence them directly or by neglect. Adair speaks for and through them, allowing their rugged, dented beauty to shine through in exceptional fashion. This assured, layered, altogether extraordinary debut collection will linger in readers' minds long after the first reading."-Los Angeles Review

"Adair's lush writing and its underpinning themes of threat, danger, and risk, much of it inherent in the lives of women, make for a nuanced, evocative, and glittering first book."-RHINO

"The poems of The Clearing form an intricate, compelling whole, sensual and musical, haunted (one poem literally featuring a ghost), and committed to focusing on what is often too blurry to see . . . the difficulty of wresting forms of love from forms of violence. . . . The Clearing is a wonderful, exhilarating debut, a book for any who want to live for a while in the realm of the inarticulable."-Plume

"Adair's poems are set in new stone, a new poetic language for fear, danger, and es