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Salmonella heat
Early in beautiful changelings, Maxine Beneba Clarke writes: ‘i would like a hysterectomy.’ It is a sentence with no lyrical ambition, arriving in the voice of a medical form or consent document. But in the space of a poem, it performs a different task; it returns medical language to the body that had to speak it. Clarke’s work proceeds from this logic. Her poems do not translate pain into metaphor; they record how pain enters systems: reproductive, racial, bureaucratic.
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