These Strange Bodies

Court Ludwick’s These Strange Bodies is an intimate account of two tumultuous years and a clarifying dissection of how the female body exists in public and social spaces that are 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, a stream of new lovers, a flirtation with stimulant drugs, and the ups and downs of trying to let it all go. 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.