Hazmat

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HAZMAT, meaning "hazardous material, ” is an abbreviation familiar from signs at the entrances to long dark tunnels or on the sides of suspicious containers. Here, in a series of stunning poems, J. D. McClatchy examines the first hazmat we all encounter: our own bodies. The virtuosic "Tattoos” meditates on why we decorate the body's surface, while other poems plunge daringly inward, capturing the way in which everything that makes us human-desire and decay, need and curiosity, the jarring sense of loss and mortality-hovers in the flesh. In the midst of it all is the heart, its treacheries, its gnawing grievances, its boundless capacities. With their stark titles ("Cancer, ” "Feces, ” "Jihad”), McClatchy's poems work dazzling variations on this book's theme: how we live with the fact that we will die. Crowned by the twenty-part sequence "Motets, ” which deals out an exquisite hand of emotional crises, this collection brings us a sumptuous weave of impassioned thought and clear-sighted feeling. Holding up a powerful poetic mirror, McClatchy shows us our very selves in a chilling series of images: the melodrama of the body being played out, as it must be, in the theater of the spirit.