Holy shit. Claire Hero.

I first heard about Claire Hero through Ross and we both agree that she is a damn fine poet of the body. (We've been emailing back and forth about her this week--more on that later--so please know that many of my comments here have surfaced from these emails). Saying "of the body" always seems a little weird to me, but she's really onto to something physically, more than physically, the bodily nature of everything. She's attune to animal-ness, the meat of it all, the violence of being so bodily body--the sexuality therein, caregiving, killing, the fluids of all that. "I knit a sheep house, I knit // a sheep house for my body..." She's so brilliant at combining something natural, something animal, something made from animal, and animal making. (Ross says this makes him think of "the wonderful opening to Lyotard's Libidinal Economy"). Doors come up quite often in Claire Hero's poetry and it's this sheep house, this animal world, this acknowledgement of being an animal that will be entered again and again. "Animals he takes apart" : "He knows what the meat wants".

In her poem, "The Night Was Animal," Hero wordbuilds through word splices: "owlmaw," "preyclaw," "meatbeasts". She addresses "Crackbone," a cowboyishness on the range, out in the woods type, a force of death and dismemberment. What gets established, what killers we all are, even in our night doings, even though these doings don't stop just because of night: "& still the forest continues, the linespeed never slows". The carcasses keep coming and coming. In Ross's words, it's the carnivorous grotesquerie--so beautiful and so gross that we can't look away--repulsed and attracted to what we are, animals and death, both yarn and kitty. We need this poet.

Have a listen to [The Night Was Animal], which you can find in her book Sing, Mongrel and her chapbook, afterpastures. Claire Hero is going to be reading here in Brooklyn this weekend for Yardmeter. You should come.