Identifying the Body

About JoAnne McFarland

JoAnne McFarland is a Brooklyn poet, painter, and curator. Her previous collections are Loose Horse in the Valley, A Modern American Lullaby, 13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl, and Acid Rain. Her artwork is part of many private and public collections including the Library of Congress, the Columbus Museum of Art, Dynegy Inc., and the U.S. Embassy Togolese Republic. She is the former Exhibitions Director of A.I.R. Gallery, the first artist-run gallery in the United States specifically for women artists.

Praise for Identifying the Body

The powerful poems in JoAnne McFarland’s Identifying the Body are architectural revelations, songs that speak directly to a life filled with longing, passion, and the politics of race. There are sonnets of falling in love and losing it, and directions for how to live a life of mindful beauty. Like Claudia Rankine, McFarland holds these taut moments up for our close inspection—they are indeed “what hope feels like.”
—Katherine Leiner, author of Growing Roots and Digging Out

JoAnne McFarland’s Identifying the Body is, quite literally, a moving picture (text in cinematographic jump cut, close up, and chiaroscuro) of a Black woman as she embodies herself and those she loves and mourns—lives cut down way too soon, stricken, murdered, silenced. For McFarland, identifying the body also means identifying the soul that longs for release and the passions that yearn for fulfillment right here: love and justice embodied, in full measure. This is McFarland working at the height of her powers.
—Janet Kaplan, author of Dreamlife of a Philanthropist and the forthcoming Ecotones.

In her latest poetry collection, JoAnne McFarland goes about “identifying the body” via exquisite lyric exploration. A poet as sensitive to the visual possibilities of poems as she is the sonic and allusive, McFarland’s poems are often bookmatched with their own erasures, as though run through a magnetic imaging device to reveal their hidden, and often startling, currents. Other poems written in both English and French enact the split nature of erotic love between man and woman. Duality runs through the collection; the poems read as conversations between the conscious and unconscious, the personal versus the public. JoAnne McFarland offers the body in thrall, in love, the body etched by ritual, by shame, the Black body, the female body, the body fully human. This collection is a revelation.
—Leslie McGrath, author of Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives and Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage