Winner of the 2017 Newfound Prose Prize, selected by Kathy Fish
Order a copy or get the e-book here.
“Here, in what you are reading, Meghan McClure has made of her body a book, each fragment a searching scar. I am in love with her for this. To read Portrait of a Body in Wreckages is to know intimacy, and grace, and violence, and love. It is to know the deepest reaches of human vulnerability and the aching tenderness that results when we, forever pained, move through our own hurt. It is hard to describe the beauty of this book. It is a gift of curiosity and trust. It is a compassionate testament to life both in spite of and because of birth. I wish everything I touched shimmered as true as these words do. Read this on a day you feel like surrendering, when what you do not understand becomes wild and surrounds you. “People are too big to love whole, and so we love them in parts,” Meghan writes. This book is little, so I can love it wholly. But even if it were bigger, I would rip out its pages and fashion out of them a skin.”
—Devin Kelly, author of Blood on Blood and In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen
“Meghan McClure’s segmented work ranges with breathtaking ease across the terrain of the body and memory, looping between thought-provoking quotes and lyrical fragments. This work pushes beyond the autobiographical into an urgent and timeless present tense, beautifully delving into the corporeal and giving voice to the physical self.”
—Sonya Huber, author of Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System
“In spare and fragmented lyric essays reminiscent of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, the author of Portrait of a Body in Wreckages interrogates the body as landscape, as first possession, as desired and desiring, wrecked and repaired. Or not. A stunning, thoughtful, and thoroughly original work.”
—Kathy Fish, author of Together We Can Bury It and Rift
Reviews & Interviews
Review by Claire Oleson in Cleaver Magazine.
Review by Melissa Grunow in The Coil Magazine.
Review by Logan February in Wildness.
Visit the companion website here.
