Review
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Title: This Insatiable August
Author: Maureen Clark
Publisher: Signature Books
Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 2024
Number of Pages: 76
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-56085-473-9
Price: $14.95
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
This Insatiable August by Maureen Clark is filled with poems that come to revel in the messy, porous reality of an embodied human experience. The collection is structured in four sections, each with 10-15 poems. The poems track the journey of the speaker, grappling with grief, love, sex, faith, and more. Women and others who have fought to embrace the goodness of their bodies and what it means to really value and care for these material forms we all occupy in mortality will find particular value in the collection, likely resonating with elements of the speaker’s journey.
Clark’s poems are packed with references to the quotidian, messy, physical reality of having a body—often relishing the particularities of that experience. One such reference is the delightful, surprising opening to “Lavender Dress”:
“It would be interesting to do it all backwards,/start out old and grow young,/the arthritic knuckles bending like fabric/instead of wood, cataracts clearing/before your very eyes.” (24)
I love the details here of knuckles bending—the language works together so that you can feel this hypothetical along with the speaker’s imagination.
The poems in the collection are also filled with provocative and memorable images, often playing with rendering metaphorical or emotional realities as an embodied experience. Some of these images relate to the speaker’s relationship to words. In “Thin Hymn,” Clark writes that her “mouth [is] full of dead words” (59). Love this image! I can feel my mouth clamp up, as if it too is filled with dead words. The use of words continues in “Knotted Wrack,” which Clark ends with a hope to be, to become “a woman who hoards her verbs” (68). Verbs, representing choice and agency, and will, among other things, are gathered, collected, and hoarded—like a dragon hoarding gold. Again, a striking image.
Faith, belief, religion, and spirituality are also themes throughout the collection. Poems are titled “Psalm” or “Hymn” and invoke religious imagery and themes. “Surfacing” is one poem that explicitly wrestles with some of these ideas. Clark writes, “I suffocate on Sundays/drowning in old covenants.” (65). Again, Clark here takes an emotional experience and wraps it in embodied, physical language, inviting the reader to consider a fuller range of embodiment and depth of the complicated ways that faith and belief may register in our bodies.
Maureen Clark’s This Insatiable August is a lovely collection, filled with striking images and poems that explore the complicated and wonderful realities of being a woman with a body, mind, and will of her own. Clark’s poems celebrate the uncertainties of such a life and rejoice in claiming that ambiguity for yourself—and if you resonate with those sentiments, then this just might be some poetry for you.