Bøker av Clara A. B. Joseph

What does it mean to love a woman--a mother, an other--and hold her at arm's length? Clara Joseph's third collection of poems, M/OTHER, skillfully navigates the nuances and irony of this daily exercise. With each turn of the page, the narrative gains emotional intensity and takes readers on unexpected journeys, such as this one: ""He smiled like the man he was/as he copied wonder into my lap, . . ./And I bent to smell his washed scalp;/the nip was barely visible . . ./And the snake slid away/in the shadows between/our hooves."" While the collection playfully experiments with language and form, it never obscures the gravity of its themes, as in the parenthetical query: ""(Could I be a Ruth to my Naomi?/Or would I be--simply--ruthless?)"" The collection is divided into three parts, each exploring the multifaceted nature of motherhood, uncovering biographical details, certainties, uncertainties, and the intricacies of hidden pasts. It also contemplates unconventional messages, both reverent and irreverent, unveiling their magical essence. In the final section, the book contemplates senility and will, death and miracle, and survival and freedom.

Ranging from satire to meditation to philosophy to the comic, ClaraJoseph's second book of poetry, Dandelions for Bhabha, is an intenseengagement with philosophers and literary/cultural theorists and theircontroversial positions. Her poems refl ect on the postmodern conditionwhen "The screaming begins at the wall / when one chick is taken"and "Universal Justice is dragged / to Auschwitz." The collection,divided into three sections, "Descartes' Lover," "Jus' Thinkin'," and "ToTalisman," engages with ethics and with thinkers such as Roland Barthes,Jeremy Bentham, Homi K. Bhabha, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida,Michel Foucault, Mahatma Gandhi, Stephen Greenblatt, David Hume,Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Gayatri Spivak. The poemsin Dandelions for Bhabha are, as the title hints, enchanting and unexpectedopportunities to philosophize art and aestheticize thought. Narrativesof miracles, refl ections on visuals, and dialogues of the dead enter thehopes, joys, and wonders of daily living. Joseph's skill is to narrow the gapbetween the creative and the critical, and to provoke.