HAZMAT, meaning "hazardous material," is an abbreviation familiar from
signs at the entrances to long dark tunnels or on the sides of
suspicious containers. Here, in a series of stunning poems, J. D.
McClatchy examines the first hazmat we all encounter: our own bodies.
The virtuosic "Tattoos" meditates on why we decorate the body's surface,
while other poems plunge daringly inward, capturing the way in which
everything that makes us human-desire and decay, need and curiosity, the
jarring sense of loss and mortality-hovers in the flesh. In the midst of
it all is the heart, its treacheries, its gnawing grievances, its
boundless capacities.
With their stark titles ("Cancer," "Feces," "Jihad"), McClatchy's poems
work dazzling variations on this book's theme: how we live with the fact
that we will die. Crowned by the twenty-part sequence "Motets," which
deals out an exquisite hand of emotional crises, this collection brings
us a sumptuous weave of impassioned thought and clear-sighted feeling.
Holding up a powerful poetic mirror, McClatchy shows us our very selves
in a chilling series of images: the melodrama of the body being played
out, as it must be, in the theater of the spirit.