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

Meriwether Clarke’s full-length debut, BODY MEMORY, traces the formation of identity against a landscape of gendered dehumanization, alienation, and violence. With lyrical clarity, her poems illuminate an interior voice searching for independence and connection amidst personal loss, social isolation, and righteous rage. Both tender and fierce, Clarke’s poems reveal an essential perspective on contemporary femininity.

Available for pre-order:

• Bookshop

• Asterism Books

• Barnes and Noble

• Unsolicited Press

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