C.S.E Cooney Rhysling Award-Winning Poet, Author of "Dark Breakers"

Poet Katherine McClintic was not kidding when she titled her new poetry collection Ending the War on My Body. Though her verses are often playful and quick, with both internal and external rhymes that cry out for crying aloud, the subject matter is neither. Less flippant than flip-the-table furious, this memoir-of-the-body told in poems begins in an agony of self-hate and confusion. The poet questions and doubts the lessons she is taught about her body even as she is force-fed them, and the taste of those pages is bitter and full of bile. But the arc of McClintic’s personal war narrative—however bellicose, however jagged—leads ultimately toward victory: and therein, the extraordinary. Tenderness is McClintic’s victory condition; “victoriousness over all the viciousness.” What begins in misery ends in celebration, even elation. Even, as the poet herself might call it, “a feast.”

-C.S.E Cooney Rhysling Award-Winning Poet, World-Fantasty Award Winner and Author of Dark Breakers