Making its debut in Assiah is TS Press novelist Claire Donato’s stunning first collection of poems, The Second Body, brought to you by Poor Claudia. Watch this space for a review, and in the meantime, we encourage you to read an essay by Claire at the Poetry Society of America, meditating on the title poem from The Second Body — an essay to which the editors of PSA felt compelled to attach a disclaimer: “This piece contains references to abuse, suicide, and self-harm.” We’ll never quite understand such disclaimers (please ignore my trauma if it makes you uncomfortable?), but that’s beside the point, and in any case such disclaimers serve as great advertising for an even better essay about all the scary things that Claire chooses to face as a writer even if certain readers do not possess the same fortitude. We note that the essay also refers to demons and dead animals, and that the former are both real and really scary, but the latter are frequently read as “food” (see “human privilege”) and so who cares, right?
But don’t take our word for anything. Scary Haute-Occult Author Kate Durbin says:
What is The Second Body? Alice in the pit of despair, humming pop songs and practicing inversions. The ocean, sex, void, women. Dead chickens. “Doves at the edge of the lake / Falling across the age of the computer.” A bomb going off on the patriarchy. Gloom and glee, bones and teeth: this is how Claire Donato is trying to describe the world to you.
Go now. Read excerpts here. Buy the book here.