Maxine Beneba Clarke\u2019s beautiful changelings maps the transformations of women\u2019s lives: the growth, the work, the joy, the exhaustion, the defiance. Across four sections, Clarke charts what it means to move through womanhood under pressure, finding grace and survival in language that\u2019s musical, furious and full of care.<\/p>\n
\u201cA woman\u2019s work\u201d sits at the centre of the collection. Clarke reworks the old saying \u201cWomen hold up half the sky\u201d into the harder truth that \u201cthe half they hold up\u2019s heavier\u201d. The poem captures the relentless weight of feminine labour during the pandemic, when caregiving, home life and endurance blurred into one. It\u2019s exacting but compassionate, finding poetry in the fatigue. \u201cWhat het men don\u2019t want\u201d is sharp, funny and infuriating. It reads like a rallying cry for women who have been ghosted, gaslit or worn down by casual contempt. Clarke\u2019s performance background shows in the rhythm and bite of her phrasing. You can almost hear the applause lines.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere the collection moves towards other revelations. \u201cThe body keeps song\u201d rewrites Bessel van der Kolk\u2019s trauma text into something celebratory, suggesting our bodies also remember pleasure and the joys and autonomy that have kept us going. It sits painfully beside \u201cI would like a\u00a0hysterectomy\u201d, where a speaker pleads for bodily autonomy against medical indifference. Together they expose the difference between how a woman and society view her body. Clarke also revisits myth. In \u201cSirens\u201d she gives voice back to the silenced, transforming warning into invitation. Her writing pulls from classical storytelling yet feels utterly of this place, rooted in suburbia and diaspora, aware of the politics and violence running under daily life.<\/p>\n
The power of beautiful changelings lies in its shifts of tone. Clarke can turn from tenderness to rage in a single breath. Her language remains lush but never ornamental: beauty here is labour, not luxury. If Carrying the World confronted injustice on a public scale, beautiful changelings turns inward to show its private cost.<\/p>\n
Clarke proves the body may tire of holding up the sky, but it still sings. This is a\u00a0book to read aloud, to recognise yourself in\u00a0and to rest with when the sky feels too heavy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ultimo Press, 304pp, $29.99<\/p>\n
\n This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
\n October 18, 2025 as “beautiful changelings”.<\/p>\n
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