Reasons to Leave the Slaughter speaks of a rural landscape, this “farm life,” will lure you in, draw you down to the pond for afternoons of fishing, picking mulberries, and climbing trees. It is also a place of broken limbs, animals dying every season, storms raging down on the flimsy shell called home. Reasons to Leave the Slaughter speaks of the balance between our desperate human need to “own” land, to have a place, a home, and to control it with fences and property lines. This book also calls upon nature’s constant battling back, crushing plans and hopes with an infestation of one pest or another, a tornado crumpling new buildings into dust, an animal’s death. This book revels in the discoveries of youth, the hopes and despairs of growing old without seeming purpose and the ever-present balance of beauty within brutality. Ben Clark’s poems understand the weirdness of living, of loving and being loved, of grit and breath and what bangs around in our everyday bodies. Made of asphalt and sweat and farm dirt, these are honest, important poems. I love their singing. - Marty McConnell, author Clark's voice welds tension to narrative so seamlessly, we can scarcely tell sometimes where the literal ends and the wonder begins. His, is an armageddon of tension holding together taut strands of unbelievable beauty and charismatic curiosity. -Roger Bonair-Agard, “Tarnish and Masquerade"