Court Ludwick’s These Strange Bodies is an intimate account of two tumultuous years and a clarifying dissection of how the body exists in public and social spaces rooted in gendered and sexual violence. Composed of essays, prose poems, and the occasional experiment, this memoir-in-fragments navigates sexual assault, a mother’s arrest, a panic disorder diagnosis, a breakup, and the challenges of representing traumatic experience through language. As the collection grapples with memory’s fragmentary nature, past and present collide on the page. And as Ludwick charts the difficulty of filling in the gaps, threads blending cultural critique, human anatomy, poetry, and personal narrative expose the strange acts historically forced on bodies, the estrangement one can experience from their body, and the strangeness that is felt when trying to find a way through all this chaos, through all this strange.
Praise for These Strange Bodies
These Strange Bodies, by Court Ludwick, is an incantatory and haunting collection of hybrid pieces—seamlessly moving in the liminal diastema of lyric essay and prose poem—that enact a series of powerful meditations on (dis)embodiment. Part memoir, part body horror, part catalogue of the mysteries and vulnerabilities of human physiognomy, these are pieces that unflinchingly transgress the boundary crossings and trespasses between inside and outside. Here, memories are poltergeists that linger and disrupt sinew, tissue, brain, blood, and bone. Frequently gutting, exceptionally lyrical, and relentlessly inventive, this is a riveting, skilled, and visceral debut.
—Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50
With this powerful collection, Court Ludwick has pulled up a chair and taken her rightful place in our hearts and literary landscape. This debut is populated by flawlessly written essays, poems, and experimental pieces, each adorned with such clear purpose that strike at the heart, while offering us a new way of examining themes of womanhood, love, family, community, and more. I am in absolute awe of Ludwick’s brilliance.
—Ukamaka Olisakwe, author of Ogadinma
These Strange Bodies is an ethereal work that unbraids the trauma narrative through formal experimentation and fragmentation. Ludwick’s journey is both kinetic and electric, slipknotting readers through painful and revelatory self-discovery, into the liminal space between sleeping and coming to. With her lyricism and poet’s cadence, Ludwick reveals how assault, arson, scalpels, and other bodily and societal threats forced her into divided perspective calisthenics where she must simultaneously exist outside of the body while remaining trapped inside the silo of the self. These Strange Bodies is a memorable, visceral memoir. Readers will feel less alone after reading it.
—Tara Stillions Whitehead, author of They More Than Burned