BODY MEMORY

Praise for BODY MEMORY

The speaker in these poems lets us live shimmering moments of being embodied, of coming of age, of navigating the natural world as though it were eternally new. Which it is! With the understated grace of haiku and a rock-steady gaze, Clarke explores the eloquence of physicality and evanescence, what beauty is, the unfurling of a soul from girlhood to womanhood. Whether it’s via a make out session in a meat locker(!) or by means of a meditation on having a mouth, Clarke’s poems focus and brighten the mind like a day spent by a lake.

Amy Gerstler

Meriwether Clarke’s debut poetry collection, Body Memory, invites its reader into a rich corporeal interior, where spare and precise poems reverberate the subtle and egregious cruelties of a broken world. Here, the exterior form shifts, transforms into cow, city, panther, a split open peach, interrogating the ways the body is witnessed, and by whom. Often at odds with the yearning to be both seen and known, Clarke asserts “Desire is wanting/ two selves at once.” As she tunnels through time and geography, Clarke’s beautiful and aching collection offers the body as portal and cage, while never abandoning the many selves who live inside.

Sarah Pape, author of Forgive the Animal

In Meriwether Clarke’s incredible new collection, memory is not an abstract.  It is, evocatively, a swallowed piece of rope, a pocket knife carving lopsided hearts into feet, and “stalactites/broken at their roots.”  These are intensely personal poems, yet written in the tactile language of imagery that will resonate with all readers.  We finish this wonderful book knowing the speaker closely, and also with a better sense of our shared histories. Body Memory will stay with you for a long, long time.

Robert Krut, author of Watch Me Trick Ghosts and The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All On Fire

About MERIWETHER CLARKE

Meriwether Clarke’s poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, Seneca Review, Sixth Finch, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A graduate of UC Irvine’s Programs in Writing and Northwestern University, she has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center, the Community of Writers, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her chapbook, twenty-first century woman, was released by Dancing Girl Press in 2019. She currently lives in Santa Barbara, California.