The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion

by Eli Clare

A collection of poetry and prose, The Marrow's Telling 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.

Genres: Poetry, Disability, Queer, Transgender, LGBT, Memoir, Nonfiction

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

White, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli Clare lives near Lake Champlain in occupied Abenaki territory (also known as Vermont) where he writes and proudly claims a penchant for rabble-rousing. He has written two books of essays, the award-winning Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, and a collection of poetry, The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion. Additionally he has been published in dozens of journals and anthologies.

Eli works as a traveling poet, storyteller, and social justice educator. Since 2008, he has spoken, taught, and consulted (both in-person and remotely) at well over 150 conferences, community events, and colleges across the United States and Canada. He currently serves on the Community Advisory Board for the Disability Project at the Transgender Law Center and is also a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow (funded by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). Among other pursuits, he has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program, and helped organize the first ever Queerness and Disability Conference.

When he's not writing or on the road, you can find him reading, camping, riding his recumbent trike, and otherwise having fun adventures.

Reviews

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rougher and more intimate than Clare's more mainstream works, this collection remixes both familiar and previously unpublished work to trace Clare's queercrip&transMad bodymind from childhood to the present and beyond. He weaves personal and collective trauma -- and, meaningfully, individual and collective / micro and macro acts of resistance -- to draw parallels and throughlines between catastrophic nuclear violence, ecocide, genocide, and imperialism and the horrors inflicted on bodyminds marked as racialized, feminized, queered, and cripped.

I found it particularly refreshing that, while Clare discusses his own experiences of abuse with more frankness than in E&P or Brilliant Imperfection, he remains uncompromising in his refusal to forgive or to forget, rendering the question of forgiveness and reconciliation with his abusers. Rather, he chooses to build bridges to other worlds and relationalities out of the discarded artifacts of a miserable past, and indeed, between moments of trauma and despair are Clare's trademark odes to the loves of his life, both human and more-than-human.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy fuck, y'all. This book is incredible. Eli Clare weaves a complex, nuanced story of identity, memory, reclamation, and redemption through the 15 years of poetry and prose included here. He's a gifted poet, and i can relate to so much of what he writes about...i fucking cried my face off. READ IT NOW.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the poetry, but I'm not sure how effective the motif of 'marrow' is as a metaphor or as a narrative thread.
Either way, it was a wonderful read, and I appreciated that Eli offers a viable solution to our inherant attitudes of discrimination, othering, and ignorance.

[Hywel Barrett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in a frenzy in one sitting in the Queens' library, and I suspect I would rate it higher if I didn't, but if I amend my rating and attempt to weave impartiality into my reviews I know I'll never succeed. Eli Clare warns against reading it like this in the foreword, and warns that it's repetitive on purpose to show evolution, repetition and contradiction in a life. This repetition was the main thing I struggled with.
Once or twice, this book made me feel incredibly seen. The moment where Clare discusses being a trans guy and telling a cis guy that if you become lovers then he has to remember that you're gay in the sheets as much as you are in the streets is so honest and speaks so well to my own experiences. The references to trauma are as brutal as trauma often is. In general, this collection's main strength is its honesty. I enjoyed it very much, and it has left me with a lot to think about.

[Jodi Geever · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy the work of Eli Clare. I had discovered it in the summer of 2006 at an inclusive Philosophy summer institute at Penn State. Since then, I had remained in awe of the work, spanning both philosophy and poetry. This was my first exposure to his verse.

I appreciated this work, but it wasn't what I expected. It was more therapeutic than lyrical, and I honestly think that's what I needed right now. The rhythm I expect from poetry came from the vivid imagery and line breaks rather than the language Clare employs.

I feel like this book is owed more time than I was able to spend with it, and I hope to revisit it in the future.

[Haku · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an expansive gift it is to trace the cartographies shared here. If this book was a map, it would be one of those 3D geographical maps where you can feel each tributary, valley, and peak.

[Mel Baggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though we've only talked a little online, I've always felt a strange geographic connection to Eli Clare. He grew up in the same sort of small-town rural working-class Oregon town that my mother grew up in. And now he teaches at a university just down the street from me in Vermont. I don't pretend this makes us connected in any true way, but it feels like a connection and gives his work more urgency than it would otherwise have.

I wish I could be even a tenth the poet that Eli Clare is. He makes you feel everything that happens, in stark, spare language without a word out of place. When I finished this book, I wanted to read more of his poetry. So I read it again and again instead, getting more from it each time. It's that kind of book. And it's not just the accidents of our personal histories that make me love his work so much.

[Lynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really amazing. Some pieces were a struggle for me to get through (for obvious reasons, if you pick up the book), but worth it. I appreciate that there's a warning related to which pieces might be triggering for folks. I don't know what to say other than "amazing".

[Dalice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eli Clare is amazingly talented, beautiful with his words and imagery.
This collection of poems will dazzle even the most hardcore, anti-poetry person.
It wonderful and telling of the vast genius possessed by Clare.

[sylas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll read it again and again... Loved it.

[Eli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eli Clare has a gift for capturing the complexity of social justice, identity, and the body in language that's earthy and clear. These poems will stay with me for a long time.

[Mills College Library]

811.6 C5912m 2007