Please join me for an afternoon of reading, conversation, and the launch of Instar Books' latest title, THE THINGBODY: AN ILLUMINATED VERSE MEMOIR. Books will be available for sale in Wunderkammer Seed form as well as all formats of e-book. For more information about the book and the author see below.
THE THINGBODY
In the wake of an act of focused violence, a concert musician experiences an obsessive-compulsive breakdown that leads her into treatment for anxiety and disordered eating. There, denied of her “ethical privilege of person,” she must assemble disparate elements—Western music, Continental philosophy, Herman Melville, and more—into a map of her escape route.
Blending a radical approach to rhythm and language with experiments in typography, interactivity, Claymation, and the limits of textual form, Clare Louise Harmon’s debut collection The Thingbody charts her titular heroine’s journey from trauma and self-destruction toward reality and God.
Advance Praise
“A harrowing ‘verse memoir’ in short vignettes of propulsive prose poetry, whose contents and sensibility resonate with the great Western explorations of female interiority both on and off the rails (Jane Eyre, The Yellow Wallpaper, Tender Buttons, Mrs. Dalloway, Wide Sargasso Sea) . . . The Thingbody explores the edge of bearable female existence in an age of plenty: suicide attempt, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the requisite stint on the psychiatric ward which is both a prison and a safe space. The struggle to become vulnerable . . . is beautifully rent and rendered.”
—Maria Damon, author of Dark End of the Street
“Part quaint, part quotidian, robustly playful and hauntingly serious, The Thingbody is a multimedia achievement in many ways: designed to be seen with the ears, heard with the eyes, and touched with the mind. With its pervasively alliterative phonology, anaphoric diction, and run-on syntax, we are forcibly confronted by a wave of boldly experimental prosepoems which endow the jaded stream-of-consciousness method with a surrealist freshness. In this work, Clare Harmon points us back—and forward—to the admirable “dirtiness” of orality and the questionable “purity” of the written word. The Thingbody is a work the listening, reading world will talk about for a very long time.”
Niyi Osundare, author of Not My Business
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Clare Lousie Harmon lives and works in New Orleans, LA. She has been twice nominated for the Pushcart and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Quaint, PANK, The Stockholm Review of Literature, Loose Change Magazine, and Tammy. Trained as a classical musician, she turned to poetry in 2013 and has since, never looked back. She is completing an MFA at the University of New Orleans.
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