Poetry. BEAR STORIES is a series of investigations into the violences of erotic love, where violence is figured as a natural consequence of the body's vulnerability. These "stories" seek to describe, implore, and seduce their audience. But they are also the mind trying to come to terms with the paradoxes of desire, wherein the "domestic" habits of care of oneself and care of the other take on an unreal quality, constantly under threat from the natural world, just as the body is under threat, the mind is under threat, language is under threat. While the speaker enters the uncanny and haunted wilderness with the distance of a visitor, her desire and language swell into an embodiment of the "grid and viscera."

Bear Stories

Literature & Fiction

Chapman, J'Lyn

Poetry

Calamari Press

Fiction. Hybrid Genre. At once far and nearsighted, visionary and intuitive, this collection traces the uncanny coincidences and resemblances of the wilderness, mourning, the archive of natural history, the voracity for human flight, and apocalypse. "We could nurse the wound of it or adjust. Beauty wants to replicate itself, and so I understood my craving to chew the blooms of flowers and to reproduce. It involved me and I was dripping with it, but when I reflected on my thoughts I found so much disfigurement. It was not so much that the bush burned without expending fuel but that the world provided endless fodder."

Beastlife

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. Taking its inspiration from the artist Uta Barth's photographs of the sun as it enters her home and the poet Francis Ponge's notebooks kept during the German occupation of France, this collection of lyric essays contemplates light as seen through the domestic space and its occupants, predominantly the author's young children. Meditations on how through light the external world enters into and transforms the private spaces of self and home inextricably link to the author's writing on life, or the giving of life. These vocabularies weave and tangle while the essays' forms depict the staccato rhythms of thought and the estrangement of time one experiences when living with children. The essays can be read as standalone pieces, yet build on one another so that patterns emerge, like the obviation of how language serves to illuminate and veil meaning, the repetition of and ekphrastic approach to religious imagery, and the ineffable experience of depression. These essays continually return to the speaker's admission that the life one gives another is ultimately unsustainable and that despite this catastrophe of living there is the resilience and bewilderment of being together.

To Limn / Lying In

Essays & Correspondence

PANK Books

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Books by Chapman, J'Lyn

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Chapman, J'Lyn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Bear Stories

Beastlife

To Limn / Lying In