Joanne McFarland

Identifying the Body Joanne McFarland

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. JoAnne McFarland asks, if we are our bodies, what do we do when they betray us? When the life leaves them? When we cannot convince them to reach for what we want to become? Says Leslie McGrath, Duality runs through the collection; the poems read as conversations between the conscious and unconscious, the personal versus the public. JoAnne McFarland offers the body in thrall, in love, the body etched by ritual, by shame, the Black body, the female body, the body fully human. This collection is a revelation. Janet Kaplan calls this book a moving picture--text in cinematographic jump cut, close up, and chiaroscuro--of a Black woman as she embodies herself and those she loves and mourns--lives cut down way too soon, stricken, murdered, silenced. For McFarland, identifying the body also means identifying the soul that longs for release and the passions that yearn for fulfillment right here: love and justice embodied, in full measure.