The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion

Eli Clare

A collection of poetry and prose, The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion spans fifteen years, exploring how bodies carry history and identity over time. Embracing contradiction and repetition, this work maps itself around embodied experiences of disability, race, gender transgression and transition, family violence, and sexuality.

Critical Acclaim

Eli’s work in The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion detonates inside of you, right to the edges where you balance. His language reveals the complex realities of bodies in conflict and betrayal, lives in desire and refusal, identities forming or bolted in place, winds, rivers, fields granting respite and escape. He is an extraordinary poet, a remarkable story teller; using language sparingly so that it goes to your core. Embodiment, class, disability, abuse, race, gender, transition—are all shaped through intricacy and resistance, nothing easily solved or summed up. This book is a gift. Read it. His words are breathtaking.” — Amber Hollibaugh, My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home

With The Marrow’s Telling: Words In Motion, disability and transgender activist Eli Clare combines a keen eye for the beauty of the natural world with a keen sense for injustice and a subtle ear for storycrafting. The Marrow’s Telling is tactile, tangible, penetrating; a soft swirl of muted colors that sneaks in under your guard and leaves a lingering taste in your mouth, rather like woodsmoke or blood. Poignant and hopeful, this is the kind of poetry you’d give a friend who was moving across country on a long bus ride, to bear them up against the tribulations of the road. Eli Clare is both inspired and muse in this book, patiently mined from the deep spaces in the soul.” —Raven Kaldera, Sacred Power, Holy Surrender: Living a Spiritual Power Dynamic

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