Poetry. Following her genre-bending novella BURIAL, Claire Donato's first full-length collection of poems THE SECOND BODY meditates on love, language, animals, science, and death. An independent digital arts curator at Babycastles Gallery in Manhattan and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Architecture Writing and BFA Writing programs at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Claire is both the author and the titular second body of the text, in which she appears as a character and female subject alienated by doom, greenhouse gases, Gchat, and sex. As Donato writes in "Corpse Pose," "There are ways in which to see inside a person's body using text." THE SECOND BODY is the fractured self that emerges into a 21st century landscape of terrorism and hyperreality, exported via corporate networks to the cloud. "What is THE SECOND BODY? Alice in the pit of despair, humming pop songs and practicing inversions. The ocean, sex, void, women. Dead chickens. 'Doves at the edge of the lake / Falling across the age of the computer.' A bomb going off on the patriarchy. Gloom and glee, bones and teeth: this is how Claire Donato is trying to describe the world to you."—Kate Durbin "When a speaker in Claire Donato's poem 'Grief Interlude' says, 'I care in different meanings, none of / Which are paraphrasable,' we're getting to the root of these poems, which will try everything to articulate the broken and reverent heart that made them. These poems are thick with music and formally rangy and sort of amazing for the things they actually did to me, among which: hurt; puzzle; astonish; delight. Which is to say—they moved me. They move me. Hard to paraphrase that too."—Ross Gay "Generous, violent, open, and dark, THE SECOND BODY continuously lays clear a self-other, and that self- other continuously extends into the universe. As a person, and a reader, I feel very thankful for that, to be in that kind of space, in that kind of literature."—Amina Cain "Claire Donato is a rare and beguiling voice. I am tempted to call her a sincere trickster—the love-child of Joseph Cornell and Carrie Brownstein, perhaps. There is great rigor beneath her verse, and her themes—the body in pain, supplementarity, simulacra, sexuality as textuality, the flexible borders of species-being—are striking in the precision of their arrangements, and the delicacy of their assembly, suspended between the suggestive and the vivid. 'There are ways in which to see inside a person's body using text,' she writes, and her second body—an uncanny, rewarding companion—is well worth listening to."—Dominic Pettman, author of Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age "Claire Donato's THE SECOND BODY answers and deepens the anxiety that I can't stop feeling and that poetry like hers can't stop making us feel. 'I Will Not Die Here,' 'The Pleasure of Tearing Down the Forest,' 'Off to the Nervous Museum'—titles that unnerve you, set over writing that remains unnerving and yet is remarkably studied, political, socially engaged—particularly with the making and remaking of the female subject, necessarily and unashamedly sexualized, but in edgy, productively discordant registers."—John Cayley

The Second Body

Literature & Fiction

Donato, Claire

Poetry

Poor Claudia

The first major book from a longtime legend in underground literature. In the disquieting stories of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts, a fractaled Claire Donato contemplates grief and disgust in heterosexuality, deconstructing the romance myth and the illicit fantasies which reflect our haunted selves. These fictions are populated with Lynchian characters, draped in memory and the subconscious mind, who imagine their way out of the painful limits of their world: a turtle retreats into its shell and becomes a real girl. A porn addict turns into a baby boy in the arms of his barren cyber-girlfriend. And a digitally-marred depressive joins forces with the ghost of Simone Weil to kill a chicken. Donato's fictions are precise and cutting, seamlessly integrating a vast knowledge of art through sharp criticism and a history of cult traditions: Donnie Darko, Wings of Desire, Daisies, and Twin Peaks and artists including Clarice Lispector, M.F.K. Fisher, Sibylle Baier, and The Velvet Underground. Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts concludes with "Gravity and Grace, the Chicken and the Egg, or: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian", a novella-in-vignettes that frames cooking as an entrypoint to light, awareness, and connection. With associative lyricism and a preternatural ability to gaze into the void with tenderness, Donato relays an indescribably strange perception of our world, in which maniacal grief turns to a gleeful protest before becoming, against all odds, a love letter to what remains. Cover photo: Jimmy DeSana Contact Paper, 1980 Vintage C-print Image: 15 x 23 ins. (38.1 x 58.4 cm) Copyright the Jimmy DeSana Trust Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York

Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts

United States

Archway Editions

Fiction. Set in the mind of a narrator who is grieving the loss of her father, who conflates her hotel room with the morgue, and who encounters characters that may not exist, BURIAL is a little novel about an immeasurable black hole. Like a 21st century Lispector, Donato grapples with ontology and trades plot for ambience; the result is an elegy in prose at once lyrical and intelligent, with no small amount of rot and vomit and ghosts. "Claire Donato's patient, immersive meditation on death and mourning designed in precise urn-like prose, BURIAL, fledges itself with the poise of Woolf or Loy or Carson; a kind of humming, marbled elegy for the as-yet-extant-alive, and like finding a real river in a dictionary."—Blake Butler "In her captivating book, Donato follows grief logic into a space of defamiliarization, speaking of death, television, rooms, love, nouns and voices as if confronting them for the first time. The language loops, stepping back to move forward, always circling a mind aware of its movements. It's a gorgeous fugue, an unforgettable progression, a telling I cannot shake."—Heather Christle "BURIAL is a full and vibrant illustration of the restless turns of a mind undergoing trauma. Language here serves both as escape and as a threat, at once suspect and yet the only consolation. In BURIAL, Donato makes and unmakes the world with words, and what is left shimmers with pain and delight."—Brian Evenson "BURIAL's narrator dislocates familiar language in order to present a view of the self from outside the self. Claire Donato's assured and poetic debut augurs a promising career."—Benjamin Moser

Burial

Contemporary

Tarpaulin Sky Press

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