Monica's Overcoat of Flesh by Geraldine Clarkson

This remarkable debut collection from Geraldine Clarkson is an exploration of enclosure and freedom, of what is life-affirming and what is life-suppressing, of emptiness and profusion, of silence and music, and of the impermanence and wonder of the flesh. These poems contain the uncontainable; spellbound and courageous, they roam from South American monasteries to the shorelines of memory and the truth-towers of the self, surveying matters of faith, being, tragedy, and womanhood.

Clarkson is a formally audacious poet of astonishing vision; her writing always richly riotous with detail, possessing the singular ability to move from the maelstrom of feeling to the stilled moment with an assured, quick elegance. Be led in the dance that these dreamlike and deft poems lead, allow their music to lift and move you out of the body and out of time, to somewhere quite extraordinary.