d-sorientation

A Blessing the Boats Selection with a Foreword by Aracelis Girmay

Charleen McClure’s d-sorientation wanders the landscape of loss with a weathered eye and a clenched fist. Delving deep into personal hauntologies, McClure’s speakers are dislocated—their observations and interrogations are quietly desperate as they navigate history, relationships, and dig for their roots. The lexicon of McClure’s poetry is one of intimacy and outrage, one that challenges the reader to consider their own belonging.

Through bold lyric poems that beat with brutality yet glow with softness, McClure’s debut collection is a compass, pointing the reader towards reclamation.

orientation

this far, the asphalt’s flat, parting trees
but it’s not the road you’ll take.
travel ---th, then –st,
get closer.
geographically
find the liver, trapped
in his jacket as his stagger
suggests, an engorged address:
that he is your father,
your daddydrowned home.
visit the mother down the hall with both hands
beneath the broth. the coordinates beg you
to bring the spoon to her lips, metal on flesh,
the slope of her tongue, waiting—

Praise for d-sorientation,

“If you have ever been lost in a city, which is to say alive in a body, you know exactly how bewildering life can feel. Charleen McClure’s debut collection, d-sorientation, elicits an analogous sensation as unsettling as it is compelling. To quote the last line of McClure’s penultimate poem, ‘I hear a storm.’ Dear readers, take cover.” 

— Nicole Sealey, author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure

“Charleen McClure’s debut collection is radiant and searing. d-sorientation is an offering of ferocious beauty and relentless clarity. On these pages are tangible tendernesses woven through raging storms; writing miraculously from the eye, from the center of a howl is McClure, ancient-voiced, rooted, steady.”

— Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie, author of Strut

“Throughout d-sorientation, McClure takes up the wondrous, painstaking and radical work of being in ongoingly deep relation with another through life and death, both vexed and free of the thresholds. It is so moving then that the final poem of d-orientation, ‘Transfiguration,’ is a series of unstopped, open lines. Sustained note(s) of a seriously steadfast and unending music, blessed are we to begin to know it.”

—Aracelis Girmay, Whiting Award winner, from the Foreword

© BOA Editions, Ltd. 2024