Many of you may know Clare Banks from her role with Smartish Pace Magazine, which hosts the beloved Hot L Poets Series at The Ivy and Bird in Hand. Now, we are thrilled to be celebrating the launch of Clare's debut poetry collection, NOTES ON ENDINGS, with a conversation with author Lindsay Bernal!
In the words of Mary Jo Salter, "This is a beautiful book, both as a series of individual poems and as a single artistic whole—an elegy for someone who died too young, the poet’s sister. A keenly observed natural world, including the remembered pathways of childhood and youth, keeps the frank sadness of these poems from despair. Notes on Endings is more than notes—Clare Banks shapes every poem by playing upon a few well-chosen images."
We are so glad this book will be in the world, and hope you will join us to welcome it with full festivities!
Order NOTES ON ENDINGS here
Clare Banks is associate editor for Smartish Pace and the author of Notes on Endings (Terrapin Books 2025). A recipient of two Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards, her poems have been featured in the Best American Poetry blog, and in such journals as Poetry South, Poet Lore, and Boulevard, among others. She was nominated for the Best New Poets 2023 anthology by the Mississippi Review. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland and lives in Baltimore City where she co-hosts The HOT L Poets Series.
Lindsay Bernal is the author of What It Doesn't Have to Do With (University of Georgia Press, 2018), winner of the National Poetry Series. Poems from her second manuscript appear or are forthcoming in Chicago Review, the Georgia Review, the Hopkins Review, New England Review, Oversound, and other journals. She coordinates the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, where she also co-directs the Writers Here & Now reading series and teaches undergraduate poetry workshops and courses on poetics.