Court Ludwick’s debut collection, These Strange Bodies (2024, ELJ Editions), presents a hybrid assemblage of texts that is two parts fragmented memoir of early adulthood, one part poetic exploration of embodiment. Ludwick’s unflinching archaeology of self results in a book that is at once deeply personal and creatively inquisitive. The title proffers a body that is plural and unfamiliar, much like the various forms used as tools of interrogation and discovery over the course of the book’s 152 pages. As it experiments with different techniques for presenting trauma and dissonance—including bouts with disordered eating, sexual assault, medical crisis, psychiatric definition, and family dynamics—Ludwick’s language also drifts among the currents of deeper theoretical questions about epistemology and identity. Visceral, confessional detail and hermit crab narrative techniques comprise the engine of this book, which provides readers with an able vehicle for exploring such storied waters.
A majority of the text is written in prose, served in a variety of conventions and lengths. There are single-block prose poems, including “Locusts,” a meditation on the bodies of insects; “Loose Tooth,” a dizzying pastiche of childhood memory, surrealism, and sensory detail; and “Nude,” a more detached study in ekphrasis, form, and color. Many of the narrative arc’s load-bearing passages are essays or prose memoir in the range of several thousand words, including “My Kidneys Suck” and “My Father’s Spine,” separate chronicles of hospitalization and the medicalized body; “Room 1152” and “Some Body,” narratives of intimate encounter; plus the scene-stealing “And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing” and “If I Was a Psychic On a Blue Velvet Couch,” haunting portraits of family history. Ludwick’s relationship with her mother acts like an emotional black hole at the center of the book: a gravity which pulls fragments of narrative into orbit around a common feeling of origin.
In the course of exploring such emotionally charged history, the project organically encounters difficult questions about memory, truth, the senses, and the fallibility of narrative. As Ludwick’s narrators work through the process of uncovering difficult memories and filling in rough contours with specific detail, they leave diamonds of observation for the reader scattered throughout the text. “The Grove,” a longer prose meditation on childhood and security, ends by questioning “whether memory is the one way we hold onto our past selves, or the one way we lose everything.” Later, in the micro-length “Acid Trip,” she writes, “I am worried my current life is nothing but a trauma response.” This kind of muted awareness and resulting unease pervade the book, as in the ten-page long lineated poem, “Diastema,” when the speaker asserts that “it depends on whether you’re a reliable narrator or not. & if you believe in absolute truths, or if you believe that pixels are a thing that can be manipulated into something else.” Perhaps my favorite one-liner comes from “Punnett Square,” an ingenious hermit crab text based on the eponymous scientific diagram: “mispronunciation kindles realism more than any mirror.” A pleasure and success of the book’s structure is how the unfurling implications of these hardened points provoke re-reads of supporting passages. With previously minor details brought into resonant salience, readers will see new contours in narrative terrain previously apparent as flat, replete with opportunities to dig deeper and uncover more.
The metaphor of archaeology also fits Ludwick’s conception of the body: as an object and a site of discovery, formed of incomplete remnants that may be subject to competing, dynamic interpretations. “My Father’s Spine,” a thoughtful essay about the long-term effects of physical labor, describes a type of embodied memory that preoccupies this framework:
“The muscle remembers. The bone remembers. The body does too.
The spine remembers most of all. The spine remembers the nights when the neck fell asleep funny, the days when the back carried too much weight, the weeks when the bones inside the body became slowly crushed, compressed, compacted, broken. My father’s spine had nights like that…”
Later, in “My Kidneys Suck,” Ludwick uses her own surgical history to further render objectification on the operating table, “cold and hard, unyielding, over which my lifeless body will lay . . . the vessels, the blood, the organs, my fucked-up organ, the cells in my body that will be manipulated by stranger-hands, touched by unsmiling stranger-doctors.” Since the book’s more complicated metaphors would fall without the bedrock of literal language and visual description, one downside of its sectional structure is that many pieces contain similar expository details, which might have been condensed in a more typical chapter structure.
Flights into figurative language and elaboration are just frequent enough to maintain reading momentum. Early in the book, in “If I Was a Psychic On a Blue Velvet Couch,” Ludwick herself deploys the geological metaphor of erosion as a frame for subsequent narratives:
“The problem you will inevitably find yourself having will not be with time exactly but with the erosion that comes with it. The shape of your torso will not be quite so deep an indentation in your old mattress. The shape you will have become will not move so effortlessly within walls that were constructed some time ago. And, sooner or later, you will realize that houses do not erode at the same rate that bodies, people, you, do.”
Later, in “Panic Disorder,” the metaphor shifts from erosion of substance to performance of surface: “But I don’t know if I feel outside of my body so much as I feel like I’ve forgotten where I left my coat so now I’m putting on a stranger’s jacket.” In discussions of embodiment, I find these sorts of frameworks are useful on their own only to a limited extent. Knowing that we don’t fit our environment, like a wrong coat, like a shifting torso, is relatively easy. Going further—accurately naming the reasons why; identifying causes, effects, contrasts, solutions—is both the promise and the challenge of the compositional decision to embrace hybridity.
Ludwick relies on two main strategies to make meaning from embodied dissonance: either to experiment with traditional narrative point of view, or to defy convention altogether using hermit crab forms that invoke knowledge and authority. A simile from “In Case of Emergency, Break Glass” explicitly acknowledges how multiplicity of perspective can create emergent structure: “her you’s and me’s and I’s become like her building, like the red bricks slapped together that make it up.” Ludwick leaves no doorknob unturned while exploring haunted buildings made of memory fragments, such as the powerful “Some Body,” a narrative of dissociation after sexual assault:
“this is not real and this is not me and I thought he was moving in next semester, is that right? No—I am a bird. I whip back around to face him. All I see is my reflection.
Dark hair. Center part. Wavy but more so tangled. It shroud’s the girl’s face—her face, my face—and mascara mars even darker eyes. Almost black now, my eyes. What’s left of her lipstick is smudged across her lips. Was she wearing lipstick?”
The explicit shifts between subject and object pronouns allow language to inhabit dissonant memories on their own terms. In the same piece, she writes, “I try to see if his eyes really are so frightening, but I am in the way. My reflection. Some girl. Somebody. Some body. I mouth language again, hello?” The change from “somebody” to “some body,” from person to object, mirrors the understanding of an external assailant. Such shifts in point of view, in which Ludwick recasts the same key artifacts of memory using different explanatory frameworks, are a core technique used to explore traumatic history.
Hybrid forms, on the other hand, are often used to explore broader questions. “Feed,” which combines docu-poetics integration of social media posts & confessional prose revealing their off-screen context, practically begs for a book club discussion on who is being fed; what; by whom. “Panic Disorder,” on the other hand, uses the sectional form of a research report to present reflections on the production and maintenance of psychiatric authority—followed immediately by “Multiple Choice Practice Question,” a single-page artifact that successfully extends the idea of its predecessor. Other scientific fields also exert influence, as in the aforementioned “Punnett Square,” which explicitly re-fashions a classic diagram of genetics. There is also “Breathing Exercise,” which uses a strikethrough technique reminiscent of cognitive behavioral therapy: “Start by settling into a comfortable position. As your body settles and your eyes close, bring your awareness to your breathing. Notice the breath coming in, and the breath going out. Follow the breath with your awareness…” Readers will note that many but not all instances of “your” are struck: those referring to the body are removed, while those referring to awareness are preserved. This text makes explicit the same kind of careful detail selection animating language choices throughout the book.
As with any presentation of variety, not every part of These Strange Bodies will suit every reader. Luckily for all readers, the official biography from Ludwick’s website indicates a follow-up effort, “a creative-critical project about bones, memory, and mommy issues,” that promises to elaborate on the palpable tensions underlying several of this book’s most electric passages. In the meantime, Broken Antler Magazine, for which Ludwick serves as Founding Editor-in-Chief, also offers both creative and critical work exploring related themes.