Lucile Clifton's Abject Poetics

This study examines the representation of Black women’s bodily experiences in Lucille Clifton’s poetry through Julia Kristeva’s concepts of abjection and the abject. While previous readings highlight Clifton’s political and communal engagements, this paper focuses on the affective force of sensory discomfort—disgust, boundary confusion, and bodily horror—evoked through recurring images of the uterus, hips, menstrual blood, and childbirth. These are not just biological markers but abject signifiers that disrupt white patriarchal norms and expose their anxieties around Black female embodiment. Drawing on Kristeva’s notions of sublime alienation and the chora, the paper explores how Clifton transforms horror into poetic agency and unspeakable pain into rhythmic voice. Her poetics treat abjection as a generative threshold, resisting symbolic containment and enacting a strategic, affective resistance.