afterpastures
Poems by Claire Hero
Released May 2008

5 3/8 w × 8 5/16 h × 48 pp
Sixty-pound acid-free off-white text stock
Perfect-bound ten-point glossy cover

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Claire Hero’s manuscript “afterpastures” was chosen by Claudia Rankine as the winning entrant in the 2007 Caketrain Chapbook Competition. Here, corporeality shatters in flux, body and identity transmogrified so constantly as to seem a form of gesture, a language, a dance. Hero’s poetic world is an infinite series of portals, new wombs in which a thing becomes beast, becomes feed, becomes dirt, and is again and again resurrected. Beneath a jagged surface awash in spermsalt, leafmould and eggclay, afterpastures is, at its swollen heart, an exercise in empathy, deeply and bloodily felt, for animalia in all its gnashing, clawing, living, dying intensity.

Acknowledgements
CAB/NET: “[I am made of many doors]”; Coconut: “Molt”; CROWD: “[Through the eye]” (as “On a White Skull, Found”); DIAGRAM: “Stag,” “[The night was animal]”; Foursquare: “[Brood-nursery bred]”; horse less review: “[Crackbone carries the lamb],” “[Out of the afterpastures],” “[Redness in the grass]”; Octopus: “[From huntress],” “[Mammaled, teat-].” Text Copyright 2008 Claire Hero. Cover “The World Is a Dangerous Place,” knitted object and pegasus print, Copyright 2004 Kate James. Used by permission.