Sensuous, scandalous, satirical, tender, Brooke Clark's unique debut collection is cynical and entertaining, replete with rich rhythms and playful rhymes. Urbanities is an exhilarating poetic journey across time, and along the way we meet characters — terrible poets, rip-off novelists, attention-seekers all — portraits of people struggling to find their place, proof that not much has changed in the cutthroat literary world from then to now.

Brooke Clark has published poems and translations in journals in Canada, the US and the UK and is founder of the online epigrams journal The Asses of Parnassus.. He lives in Toronto.

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"In this vivid and startling collection of imitative translations, Brooke Clark harnesses the crystalline formal precision and unflinching caustic energies of classical poets, including Martial, Catullus, Horace and Meleager, transposing them onto the realities of the modern everyday. In Clark's adept hands, book launches, caf�s, office spaces and parking lots become sites for delicately wrought and sparklingly unrepentant meanderings on beauty, lust, professional jealousy, schadenfreude and the joint terror of mediocrity and death. Like his literary forebears, Clark takes on the battles of an unjust world with a combination of anarchistic brio and tenderness. For anyone who has ever delighted in the frisson of feeling their deepest, unvarnished suspicions spoken aloud, this book is a must."
Alexandra Oliver, author of Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway and Let the Empire Down
"Urbanities should cement Brooke Clark's reputation as a master of the traditional epigram. Using the traditional tools of Swift and Byron——while always maintaining a modern tone and vocabulary——Clark brings alive these brief and memorable poems in ways certain to bring joy to classicists and poetry lovers."
A.M. Juster

"Urbanities should cement Brooke Clark's reputation as a master of the traditional epigram. Using the traditional tools of Swift and Byron — while always maintaining a modern tone and vocabulary — Clark brings alive these brief and memorable poems in ways certain to bring joy to classicists and poetry lovers."
— A.M. Juster

"In this vivid and startling collection of imitative translations, Brooke Clark harnesses the crystalline formal precision and unflinching caustic energies of classical poets, including Martial, Catullus, Horace and Meleager, transposing them onto the realities of the modern everyday. In Clark's adept hands, book launches, caf�s, office spaces and parking lots become sites for delicately wrought and sparklingly unrepentant meanderings on beauty, lust, professional jealousy, schadenfreude and the joint terror of mediocrity and death. Like his literary forebears, Clark takes on the battles of an unjust world with a combination of anarchistic brio and tenderness. For anyone who has ever delighted in the frisson of feeling their deepest, unvarnished suspicions spoken aloud, this book is a must."
— Alexandra Oliver, author of Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway and Let the Empire Down