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.
Court Ludwick is a writer, teacher, and doctoral candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at USD. These Strange Bodies, her debut hybrid nonfiction collection, is forthcoming from ELJ Editions in September 2024. Her poetry, essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in Jet Fuel Review, Oxford Magazine, Cheat River Review, Watershed Review, Eclectica Magazine, Mid-Heaven Magazine, Milk Carton Press, and elsewhere. She is an associate poetry editor at South Dakota Review, and her visual art has most recently shown at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts. She lives with her lucky black cat, October, and a couple ghosts, probably. She is currently at work on a horror short story collection and her second experimental nonfiction book. You can connect with Court on Instagram @courtlud, Twitter @courtludwick, and on courtlud.
