With the description of this poetry collection combined with the tags "horror" and "sci-fi & fantasy" I was expecting way more body horror and maybe fairytale vibes than it actually ended up being. The poetry collection in itself isn't bad at all, but I would say it's a bit more a view of the body in a love & relationship context and less surreal. Some of these poems definitely deliverd more in the horror category but most didn't really live up to my expectations.

I was captivated from the first page to the last. The author is a master of metaphor. I could see every scene so clearly. I read a lot of poetry books, but this one still stands out in the best way. The poetry consisted of the raw, soul-filled stories that readers yearn for, with the authors unique flair. It was everything that I’ve always loved about poetry mixed with new and compelling aspects. It’s the kind of heavy honesty that leaves you feeling held.

The world's flow like water.
The poems take you on out of the body journey with its magical surrealism.
The words make you relate and realise the happenings of your life and it almost feels like taking a deep in a mystic river.
Fabulous book!

This is a dark collection of poems that covers topics such as death and loss, pain, violence, magic and love and relationships. Chloe N. Clark writes with a raw honesty; her poems are full of emotions that range from love to anger and everything in between. She has a very unique style, which serves to make these poems powerful and hard-hitting in places.

There were some poems in this collection that I couldn’t connect with and others that were so steeped in symbolism and metaphor that I found it very hard to understand what her message was. However, many of the poems did resonate with me and I enjoyed the fact that some were very surreal and made me think. I also liked how some of the poems were written in the traditional style with stanzas, yet others were written almost like prose. This wide diversity in the poems made the volume as a whole more pleasurable to read.

Overall, I would recommend this book if you enjoy modern poetry; however, the subject matter can be dark in places so if you want something full of joy and happiness, perhaps steer clear. But if you want poetry that is raw, with genuine emotion and an aching beauty, this book will satisfy you many times over.

My thanks to Netgalley and Interstellar Flight Press for providing an advance copy of the book in return for an honest review. All opinions in this review are my own.

Wonderfully evocative storytelling in these works. I was quickly drawn into each piece as if experiencing it for myself.

This collection showcased a beautiful macrocosm between complex human thoughts/emotions and the natural world. Sometimes the two flowed together in with a sense of surrender, resignation or acceptance -- while other times there was a painfully jarring dissonance, as if the comparison were an emotional attempt to distance themselves from their suffering. Escaping the human Body by focusing on the outer world.

I was particularly (or personally) touched by 'Lacunae' and 'Questions For Those Who Aren't Sure Where To Begin'.

This is such a beautiful collection that really lives up to its title. There are poems on the bodies of missing women, poems that ask what makes a body a body, what our bodies consume, and their limits. There are small focuses on off-putting body parts like bones, teeth, and skin. The author goes through a relationship and breakup and explores each of their bodies and the ways that they interact and malfunction. I was a little distracted by word choice/unnecessary words at parts and wished that some of the poems were more concrete. But overall, the poems were beautiful and surprising, I was really impressed. This reminded me a bit of Olivia Gatwood and Franny Choi.

Escaping the Body feels like longing, life and death comparisons, the soulful reaction of someone in love but unable to have the object of their affections return the feeling. The longing within remembrance, fleeting feelings versus the all-consuming longing of someone who has been in unrequited love for too long, and the sense of being forgotten and left behind is profoundly exhibited throughout the poems. Some of the poems are structured more similar to a short story than a poem, beautifully tying together elegant storytelling with profound poetic symbolism of the feeling of love, the experiences of the body and mind, along with the forest and how Clark compares it to the human body and existence.

It's hard to hand sell or widely recommend poetry to an audience looking for a good book, as it is such a unique and often personal experience that not everyone enjoys. I often find myself saying I don't enjoy poetry either as a lot of it has become repetitive and seems to try too hard to be metaphorical instead of leaning into other literary techniques that might serve that specific poem better (imagery, repetition, another way of formatting the poem etc). While I did think this book fell into some of those cliches, I did enjoy it quite a bit. I thought, voice and content wise, it was a unique and distinct experience that would set it apart from other poetry collections. I'm unsure if the device I read this on formatted some of the poems oddly or if that is how they were created, but I did find them hard to understand sometimes. However, and this might seem like I'm contradicting myself, love how different each poem was. I felt that each had it's own life due to being structure differently (some were spaced out, some were blocks of text, some were more traditional stanzas etc). That all being said, I did quite enjoy this set of poems. I have to admit I didn't read every single one of them, but the ones that hooked me did keep me engaged and I could definitely see this author becoming quite popular in the poetry genre, and would love more people to read their works.

I really loved this collection. I felt each poem was genuinely strong and good. i could read one of the single poems on their own and be impressed. So having a cohesive collection really just strengthens the work. The subject matter of the poems was something i relate to and am interested it. I had been collecting my favourites and ended up with half the collection written down.

Lovely collection of mixed quality. The excellent poems are really, really excellent with some mediocre ones sprinkled throughout. I loved the structuring around magic tricks and the recurring motifs of space travel and Greek myths.

** I received this ARC curtesy of NetGalley - all thoughts and opinions are my own**

This was an enjoyable read and I really resonated with five pieces in particular: Sleepwalking, The Witch's House, Osteomancy, Cooking with Turmeric, Cephalofoil. This was such a lovely collection of poems and illustrated just how intimate loving someone can be, whether that is romantic or platonic love

This is my first read by the author, but I'm excited to look into more - I really liked it! It's a darker poetry collection, which is my favorite. I love the emotions in here, the words perfectly conveying everything from hurt to anger to apathy.

This is a bit more of an experimental collection than a lot of the others I've read this year & recently - I mean, it's not super out there or anything, but the variety in topics, way each poem is written, length, and style of each one makes it a pretty diverse collection content-wise. Even so, the author's got this clear sort of tone to their voice that reminds me of like 2 AM lo-fi, but sad; I don't know how to explain it, that's the best I can do. It's a compliment! So vibey, loved it.

Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities, Under My Tongue, Your Strange Fortune, and The Science of Unvanishing Objects. Her forthcoming books include Every Song a Vengeance and My Prayer is a Dagger, Yours is the Moon. She is a founding co-EIC of literary journal Cotton Xenomorph. Her favorite basketball player will always be Rasheed Wallace and her favorite escape artist can only be Houdini. Her newest collection, Escaping the Body, is a tour de force exploring the physical body and the liminal spaces between one’s soul and one’s skin and bones.

On the outset, Clark’s poems read like a woman’s musings on childhood and young adulthood. For example, a poem like “It’s the Horror of My Friends That We Say Mean Things About Blondes” implies some coming to terms with childhood rivalries and whatnot. However, that’s how Clark lures unsuspecting readers closer and then ensnares them with her lines:
when people say our names,
we don’t always answer
because giving in to a name
is being devoured by it,
we like it best when you
scream it

make our names sound like
sacrifice, like falling through black
holes and being pulled apart
without knowing it
Poems like this take a simple story and expand it, making it seem mythic and terrifying. This is Clark’s power as a poet, twisting the common place and ordinary into something dark and haunting for the reader.

Clark is also able to start with a horror trope and just run with it until the reader has nightmares. A poem like “The Undue Acidity in Your Veins” begins with a nightmare scenario and just builds from there:
The doctor tells us that I need
to learn how to cut into
my own skin.

“If she can’t do it now, she
won’t be able to do it when
she has to.” He says to you
not to me.
This idea, that a young woman would need to learn how to cut herself and scar her body on demand, while an apt metaphor for how society treats women, is very terrifying. However, Clark’s poem doesn’t stop there, and stanza after stanza, things get worse for the heroine in the poem while the reader is forced to watch in horror.


Escaping the Body is a phenomenal book of poetry. While not every poem in the collection is a horror poem in the truest sense, the overall collection is a dark vision which haunts the reader well after the covers have closed. Chloe N. Clark is able to take things that seem innocent and twist them into fantastic torments for her readers. Anyone who is a fan of horror poetry or poetry in general will count themselves lucky to have partaken of this tome.

I had seen a review for this collection that described the work as a whole as "aching," and I think that is an incredibly apt description. I truly enjoyed this collection and think it was so well curated. I will definitely be recommending and picking up anything from Chloe Clark in the future.

Thank you to Interstellar Flight Press and Chloe N. Clark for this ARC.
I think the problem with writing reviews for narrative poetry like this is that so much of it feels highly personal in a way that my lack of connection to it is not inherently a criticism of the work itself. I did really enjoy some of this collection, and I liked the continued horror metaphor throughout.

Escaping the Body by Chloe N. Clark is the poets fifth published collection of poetry. Clark is a founding co-EIC of the literary journal Cotton Xenomorph. She writes poetry and fiction, and some essays about food, mostly, but also does critical scholarship in the history of horror, gender and science fiction, monstrosity and othering, and inclusive practices in pedagogy.

Clark mentions in her introduction that Houdini is here favorite escape artist. His quotes along with those of other magicians including his namesake separate each section. The theme of escape and illusion flows through the poetry. "Missing Girl Found" consists of stanzas of various possible outcomes. First with the most feared result and then with other outcomes ranging from the missing girl is found wanting, or found beautiful, or found happy, or, or, or... Her treatment of the poems leaves a bit of mystery and fantasy with mentions of faeries and Melusine. The youthful willingness to see magic all around us is stifled by age and everyday routine. Clark uses magicians to create pathways for our escape. Those magicians come in many forms -- the actual magician, a forest, monsters, and myths. Escaping the Body is much more a return to youthful acceptance of our surroundings rather than a New Age separation of body and spirit. She relates to simple things as important and deserving of attention. We all have our "Rosebud" somewhere in our past. "Flight" seemed to be the keystone poem for me tying together much of her work.

The theme of escaping the flesh runs through the collection. The reader will also get reasons why escape is wanted in "Error Coding" and "But Also This is Why the Robots Always Turn on Us." There is a wide range to Clark's writing while keeping in her theme. At the start I wondered if this was poetry a middle-aged male would read, but quickly I fell into the groove and enjoyed the journeys. The writing is deep and intelligently thought through. We are led to escape our personal chains and traps in much the same way as Houdini escaped his chains and straitjackets. An excellent collection of contemporary poetry that will appeal to traditional poetry lovers.

I'm always a little hesitant to read contemporary poetry, but this was a pretty good collection. I enjoyed the imagery and the surreal quality of the writing. There was definitely a strong use of horror throughout the collection. Bones, corpses, demons, and zombies used to explore topics such as death, loss, relationships, and the female experience. Not all of the poems were winners for me, but my overall impression was positive.

Haunting collection that i would recommend to anyone. Beautiful, beautiful words and written in narrative form.

A haunting exploration of the body, the world and everything in-between featuring natural and magical motifs, some really creative inner rhymes and a tone full of yearning. Wish this pushed the boundary between magical realism and sci-fi/fantasy and/or horror a little more, but overall was a solid collection of poems that truly demonstrates the technical abilities of the author.

I thought this book was about the body. The title is what got me interested in the book. I thought it was going to a nice feeling , love book. It wasn't but I am not disappointed. This book was great and very thought provoking. I had to stop reading to think about what was being written.

I'm the title the word "body" meant all different kinds of bodies. If you really sit down and really read the poems you will see it. All bodies are in such different form, it makes the poems even more beautiful. Like I said, this book did NOT disappoint me at all. Just have me more time to think which I highly welcome.

I received a free copy of the book and is voluntarily writing a review