beautiful changelings (Maxine Beneba Clarke, Ultimo)

According to myth, a changeling is a human child replaced by a faerie – one that looks similar enough, but is not of this world. In beautiful changelings, Maxine Beneba Clarke (The Hate Race, It’s the Sound of the Thing) reimagines this idea in the collection’s titular poem, where the signs of an aging body become mysterious and otherworldly, a new and intriguing version of what once was. beautiful changelings is distinctly rooted in themes of the body and the experience of being a Black woman living in a body in flux, blooming with resistance, physicality and rage. In the arresting ‘i would like a hysterectomy’, Clarke forces the reader out of their comfort zone, leading them through a medical inferno where her pain, like that of so many Black women before her, is not believed or taken seriously, and where she must travel mostly alone. The tone shifts between poems, from the cheeky trip back in time of ‘just so you know’, to the ethereal and dangerous fairytale worlds of ‘spindle’ and ‘the sirens’, and the incandescent feminist rage of the poems in the violazione section. Yet across these shifts, her voice remains uncompromising: Clarke spares no one.  Readers who enjoy Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton and bell hooks will find familiar thematic territory here, while fans of spoken word poetry will enjoy reading her work aloud.   

Books+Publishing reviewer: Denise Jarrott is an author and writer whose work has appeared in Overland, South Carolina Review, Denver Quarterly and elsewhere. She grew up in Iowa and currently lives in Naarm/Melbourne. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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Category: Reviews