Body Memory

<p class=ql-align-justify>Meriwether Clarke's full-length debut <strong><em>Body Memory</em></strong> narrates the history of a body intent on remembering and overcoming the violence of misogyny. Faced with trauma and loss Clarke's speakers turn inward transforming the act of personal exploration into a searing reckoning with the punishing limitations of gender expectations. </p><p class=ql-align-justify></p><p class=ql-align-justify>In a world where women are constantly evaluated yet never fully seen the anxiety of potential harm is omnipresent. Startling and evocative imagery paints pointed metaphors for such suffering: desert earth in Arizona swallows itself amidst a damaging drought; cottonwood saplings wait rooted to the ground for young lovers to carve hearts into their bark; rivers exist only to turn into lakes. </p><p class=ql-align-justify></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Woven through these portrayals are meditations on the inherent toll of remembrance and how it both defines and confines identity. The collection's first poem poses the question without memory/what can there be/of days? Clarke gestures toward answers in her depictions of the connection between girlhood and womanhood as intimate unbreakable and-too often-deeply sorrowful. </p><p></p>