afterpastures, by Claire Hero. May 2008
5 3/8" × 8 5/16" × 48 pp.
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“Claire Hero conjures language in such a way that description creates possibility. In this world, where Darwin and Dickinson pass secrets, there remains little separation between a body and its landscape. Evolution engenders an exquisite bewilderment that becomes its own wilderness. Fantasy and wisdom disorientate in order to locate our ‘percentage of beauty’ in this intriguingly stunning collection.”
Claudia Rankine, author of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
“Like: throatsong that transcends by guts, gutting; a bone with a little gristle attached and some feather; where did that feather come from?; where does that meat come from; a green field with new-dug holes in spring time, springing time; Hero makes the language taste like something; ‘what doesn’t fear my hands?’”
Jen Tynes, co-editor of horse less press
“afterpastures is original. In art, there is no higher praise. In these poems, the pastoral is made to turn somersaults. Instead of bucolic calm married to mild satire in the irreal world of shepherd and shepherdess, here the scene is the knife in the hand poised to meet the beating heart. The knife is our knife, the hand, our hand. And the animal? It’s our best self—but now in the grip of destruction. These strange, moving, passionate, and crystalline poems form a fable where the animal world, under our mesmerized gaze, becomes the mirror it always was.”
Mary Jo Bang, author of The Eye Like a Strange Balloon
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.
Acknowledgments
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.