AND THE MANY SHAPES OF CLAWS

Valerie Witte

[
To make
a strong
skeleton
two or
more reeling
silk
borders
fields
form the sea
what
a mouth
wants
the ends
of limbs
]

[3.1]

To make a strong skeleton reestablish the laminar, forestalling
breakdown, theoretically | She was starting to disappear
herself | a thing used to represent | erasure
when subverting anatomy | the crest between
nipple and lip, suspended a mesh
of muscle as arteries | enable locomotion, flagella
to swim | an elaborate network reduced
to backbones | A draft of air so often betrayed her | what whiskers are
to cats | A reminder: what a scalp could
stand in for | little holes hold eyes, set close | as most
will answer | overlook our forests
the impossibility of trees |

[3.2]

Receptors that register rigid | embed a head round
as a mouth | And she became practiced at avoiding
capture | a caterpillar devouring a slight
hump inoffensive, a spine, especially connective
tissue | tendon, ligament abundant
in the gut, intervertebral | Was this really a disease | gelatin irreversibly
hydrolyzed | Or an underlying condition of which she was pretty
surprised | a quarter-moon outlined five
pairs of false legs eliminated periodically, whole | She knew naked
skin as a liability | because the pleasure | The apparent
futility of countering heredity | or lobed separately female and male, pendulous
catkins grown in rows |

[3.3]

[3.4]

Feature Date

April 10, 2024

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“And The Many Shapes Of Claws” from A RUPTURE IN THE INTERIORS: by Valerie Witte.
Published by the Airlie Press on October 1, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Valerie Witte.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission

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Valerie Witte is the author of multiple poetry and hybrid books, including A Rupture in the Interiors (Airlie, 2023), a game of correspondence (Black Radish, 2015), and, in collaboration with Sarah Rosenthal, The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (Operating System, 2019), the first of a two-part project exploring the work of postmodern dancer-choreographers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. The second book in the project, a collection of experimental essays, is One Thing Follows Another (punctum books, forthcoming 2024). She has also published multiple chapbooks, most recently Listening Through the Body (above/ground press, 2021). Witte edits education books in Portland, OR, where she lives with her husband, Andrew. More at valeriewitte.com.

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A Rupture In The Interiors

Airlie Press

Portland, Oregon

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“What does human skin have to do with the silken skein of the caterpillar’s cocoon? Each a garment that can unravel, that covers over the interiority of the subject—or ruptures the false binary of inner/outer. Valerie Witte’s ambitious, densely associative poems offer a “tissue of stories unfolding” in which she reinvents the very nature of skin: as map, as strata, as a process of reckoning. Here, Witte takes on the challenge of embodiment, its coils and fugitive film, bringing the reader into a richly lyrical disorientation. A Rupture in the Interiors is an original, gorgeous book. This poetry shows us emotional intensity forcing its way through the ostensible surface. The revelation? What covers us is really ‘a continual state of turnover.’”
—Elizabeth Robinson

“Valerie Witte’s sensuous and harrowing A Rupture in the Interiors investigates the notion of skin as sheath, as protection, and projection. A “she” narrates in fragments and slippages the body as territory through films, threads, pleats, folds, through confine and texture, dyes, boundaries and all that is permeable. Also in question is the pronoun “I” and the punctuation mark of a slash or dash or cut that runs through each carefully, delicately constructed stanza. The wonder of this book is how it makes one feel as though one is holding not page, not book, but the fine texture of skin itself. Ultimately, this book strikes the song of the body’s largest and most visible organ, where we are the most vulnerable, where we first appear then finally disappear where “we are almost human anyway.”
—Gillian Conoley

“Skin, the human body’s largest organ, is not just terrain but a castle wall. Most of its ruptures are inherently unwelcome—for skin to do its job, it shouldn’t crack after it’s allowed the thresholds of eyes, mouth, nose, ears, and genitalia. Valerie Witte’s poems record the aftermaths of such ruptures, including interiors suddenly visible. Punctuation’s vertical bars and brackets become visual poetry for scars and wounds. What’s articulated in between are metaphors for what else exists in the universe, both physically outside as well as psychologically inside. Thus, Witte’s poems accomplish poetry’s most empathetic aspiration: that to bring a poem into the world is to bring the world into a poem.”
—Eileen R. Tabios

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