Reviewed by A.C. Riffer
Eli Clare’s Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming is a collection that lives up to its title in both form and feeling. The poems do not simply move forward; they open, layer by layer, inviting the reader into a space where grief, memory, and imagination coexist. To read Unfurl is to experience language as something active and relational, something that stretches across time, body, and world.
One of the collection’s most striking qualities is its formal playfulness. Clare moves fluidly between structures, allowing each poem to take the shape it needs. This variety never feels disjointed; instead, it creates a sense of openness that makes the work deeply accessible. The poems meet the reader or listener where they are, drawing them in through clarity and rhythm rather than distance or opacity. In this way, Unfurl resists the notion that experimental poetry must be exclusionary. It is inventive without losing its grounding. For example, the beginning of The Art of Disassociation: “FORMAT NOTE: Short- often one word- lines descend in a steep arc, flying toward the right edge of the page. Interspersed into this arc are pairs of lines anchored to the left margin.” (p. 54). The commitment to accessibility invites one to contemplate form in ways they might not have before.
That sense of grounding is paired with an almost dreamlike quality. The poems often feel as though they are unfolding in multiple temporalities at once, memory slipping into the present, the present reaching toward imagined futures. This movement creates a textured emotional landscape, one shaped as much by sorrow as by possibility. Even at their most abstract, the poems remain attentive to the material realities of the body and the world, holding both with care.
Clare’s collection consistently exceeds expectations. Again and again, the poems land with a quiet precision, their closing lines lingering long after the page is turned. These endings do not resolve so much as they deepen the work, offering moments of recognition, surprise, or gentle insistence. The effect is cumulative: each poem feels complete, yet also part of a larger unfolding.
Take the last line from Your Tremoring Hands and Mine “make them remember their own shivering skin, tremulous laugh” (p.19). A call to physicality that cannot be escaped. Throughout Unfurl, there is a palpable sense of care, for language, for the subjects of the poems, and for the reader. This care is not sentimental but deliberate and sustained. It allows the collection to hold complexity without collapsing into despair, to move through survivals and sorrows while still making space for dreaming.
Unfurl ultimately invites readers to participate in this process of opening. It asks not only to be read, but to be engaged with, to be followed as it stretches, shifts, and expands. In doing so, Clare offers a collection that is as thoughtful as it is affecting, one that lingers in both form and feeling. And “Because poems are kisses, fists, and underground rivers” (p. 4), Unfurl is a beautiful collection worth reading.
Title: Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming
Author: Eli Clare
Publisher: Duke University Press
Date: 2025
Read A. C. Riffer’s reviews of In Sickness and in Health: Love Stories from the Front Lines of America’s Caregiving Crisis; Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How We are Wrong about AI; Respecting Disability: Attitudes, Ideals, and Relationships, and It Wasn’t Meant to Be Perfect: A Memoir in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Reviewer
A. C. Riffer is a hopeless romantic and enigmatically so. In their spare time, they somehow managed to earn a doctorate in Social Work from the University of Illinois Chicago, where their research explored censorship and culture.