“Whisked away on adventure after adventure.”
Happy Pub Day to Four Days in Algeria!
Poetry that captures the rhythm of travel–observing every moment, both fleeting and profound with quiet clarity.
Clarence Major’s Four Days in Algeria, one of his sixteen poetry collections, offers a vivid and unfiltered look at travel, observation, and fleeting moments. This book takes us not only to Algeria but also to destinations like Paris, Florence, and Ghana, where he masterfully captures the essence of place through vivid, serene imagery. His poetry embraces both the grand and the mundane, from the rhythm of city streets to the quiet moments of reflection over food or changing seasons. The title poem, “Four Days in Algeria,” exemplifies Major’s documentary style, where he records events with an objective lens, avoiding interpretation or sentimentality. Instead, he invites readers to witness life as it unfolds—through the people he encounters, the landscapes he moves through, and the simple yet profound details of travel. A joyful stillness emanates from the poetry, both allegorical yet spontaneous, affirming life’s adventures, and making each observation a testament to the richness of the world around us.
Among Clarence Major’s previous sixteen poetry collections are Swallow the Lake (a National Council on the Arts winner), Configurations: New and Selected Poems (a National Book Award Bronze Medal winner), and Sporadic Troubleshooting (2022). He has contributed poetry to the New Yorker, Harvard Review, American Scholar, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Literary Review, Ploughshares, and dozens of other periodicals. A Fulbright scholar, among Major’s other awards are a Western States Book Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and a PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Literature. He was elected to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2021. Major is a distinguished professor emeritus of twentieth-century American literature at the University of California, Davis.
Visit Clarence Major’s website, https://clarencemajor.com/
Praise for Four Days in Algeria
“The deep cinematic beauty and elegant directness that has made Clarence Major’s work so essential for decades to readers and writers of poems is on full display in Four Days in Algeria. In this engrossing and endearing book, we are whisked away on adventure after adventure—the poet is a globe-trotting griot, and we are blessed to travel with him—to see, sense, taste, smell, and love the world wherever he encounters it. This is a book full of delicious and sensual surprises. Clarence Major’s poems are a feast to be reckoned with, and it’s an honor to follow his global footsteps in this masterpiece of a book.”
—Allison Joseph, author of Lexicon and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman
“Four Days in Algeria strolls and accumulates its way, layer upon layer, until it catches “the intensity, the throbbing of life” only poetry, and a writer of this skill, can craft. What an uncanny world Clarence Major sings. A very powerful book!”
—Cornelius Eady, author of Hardheaded Weather and Brutal Imagination
“Radiant with attentiveness and loving compassion, every poem in Four Days in Algeria brings the world closer, simultaneously embracing both the other and the reader with knowledge and tenderness. ‘Sunlight pours in’! Such a beautiful book!”
—Rikki Ducornet, author of Brightfellow
Check out the excerpt from the poem “Houseboat”
HOUSEBOAT
On the river the blue houseboat was a comfort, a way to get away form the
house and routine, away from the city and city noise and to listen instead to
the river lapping and shifting and to birds cheeping and see frogs leaping, to
sit back on the daybed and read a book or work on a poem, to stay most of
the day.
Order Four Days in Algeria here,
Don’t buy plane or train tickets! Buy Clarence Major’s amazing new book, and see the world (Spain, Jamaica, Lake Tahoe, Algeria, everywhere) with as much clarity, humor, empathy, and pleasure as any seasoned traveler could ever hope for. All of Major’s singular talents power this collection, especially his five sharp senses for realism, his detours down back alleys of surrealism, and his magic of pulling characters fully formed from surprising gestures, like the spouse in her fifties “with her elbows on the table/and her fists under chin – revisiting her early expectations” or the “toucan looking about for his next move.” Four Days in Algeria has the steady rhythm of a page-turner, the soulful rewards of pure observation, and the deep satisfaction of a great vacation.