Circadian

July 10, 2017
Clammer (BodyHome), a contributor to McSweeney’s and the Rumpus, engages with trauma, letting go, and the pleasures of writing in this collection of 12 lyric essays. She is a compassionate and self-reflective narrator, weaving the personal into experiments with form. In “Outline for Change,” she includes mathematical formulas and a diagrammed sentence in recounting her father’s descent into alcoholism and chronic pain from cyclically recurring headaches. Throughout the collection, Clammer moves between the serious and the playful, confessing how her father’s struggles and how being a victim of sexual violence affected her, but also reveling in the joys of language. In “I Could Title This Wavering,” she tells us: “I know I’m really into verbs and nouns right now. Which is to say writing. Pen to page then fingers to keys, QWERTYing.” She analyzes oppression through the lexicon in “Mother Tongue,” an essay on how phrases such as “wife beater” and “Indian giver” denote inequality. For “Trigger Happy,” Clammer interviews Lacy M. Johnson, a writer and survivor of sexual violence, to arrive at the conclusion, “Push harder to think critically about your discomfort.” Each essay builds on the one before, demonstrating the author’s evolution as a writer and survivor. Clammer has successfully bridged genres here while exploring difficult subjects.

August 15, 2017
Unconventional essays offer intimate glimpses into a writer's heart and mind.In her second collection, Clammer (BodyHome, 2015) once again stretches the boundaries of the form, pushing against "the tenuous fences between poetry and fiction and nonfiction and humor and critical writing and academic writing and blogging and every other genre that has existed, ever, in order to discover how to discuss our lives." The essays are notable for their inventive language; many take the form of prose poems or verbal collages; one is constructed of bullet-pointed sentences; another, like a class syllabus. As the title suggests, the essays circle around several recurring themes: Clammer's relationship with her father, an "outstanding alcoholic" and "the catalyst," she writes, "for every problem in my life"; her various health problems, including PTSD, an eating disorder, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism; suicide (she made two attempts); and the writing life. The title essay focuses on a particular circadian image: her father, pacing in circles as he tried to get relief from the "throbbing, clobbering" cluster headaches that blighted his life, the aftereffect of a head injury. Sometimes he howled with pain; he self-medicated with alcohol, and he tried to kill himself. After he died, Clammer was left with traumatic memories of his suffering: "there was no healing. No desire for sobriety. No want for life. The only thing present was his continuous hurt." Suicide recurs in several pieces, especially one essay about her work in a mental hospital for homeless adolescents with addiction and mental health issues. "I was just a woman with a sober heart, with a steady and medicated brain, with a belief in each youth's sobriety," she writes. She felt attached to one girl, who eventually died--accidentally, though she often threatened to kill herself--and Clammer struggles to understand the depression, vulnerability, and fear that led to the young woman's death. An affecting memoir emerges from a dozen circuitous, digressive essays.

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