Instar Books

51 pages in PDF form, $10

Review by Maya Lowy

Pushcart-nominee Clare Louise Harmon’s debut collection, The Thingbody, is a kind of claustrophobic flipbook, a philosophic, psychotropic memoir. It sears your eyeballs, claws at your fingers, begs to be listened to. Ultimately, the book is more than the sum of its parts. It mosaics into a compelling peek into a burgeoning academic mind.

Forty-one pages of poems (available, for now, only in PDF: in many ways, Thingbody is a book-of-the-future) alternate between neon-bright blocks of color and postmodern blocks of text. If Gertrude Stein and James Joyce had ever had some sick, stuttering baby, it might look a little like Thingbody. Hand-drawn illustrations throughout remind us of the gruesome, homuncular, and yet somehow not indelicate body of this titular thing. “Call me Skinsack for I am the deindividuated,” Thingbody opens. “I am that which seeks violence seeks and lacks ethical privilege of person.” Continue reading →