Maxine Beneba Clarke’s beautiful changelings maps the transformations of women’s 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’s musical, furious and full of care.
“A woman’s work” sits at the centre of the collection. Clarke reworks the old saying “Women hold up half the sky” into the harder truth that “the half they hold up’s heavier”. The poem captures the relentless weight of feminine labour during the pandemic, when caregiving, home life and endurance blurred into one. It’s exacting but compassionate, finding poetry in the fatigue. “What het men don’t want” 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’s performance background shows in the rhythm and bite of her phrasing. You can almost hear the applause lines.
Elsewhere the collection moves towards other revelations. “The body keeps song” rewrites Bessel van der Kolk’s 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 “I would like a hysterectomy”, 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 “Sirens” 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.
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.
Clarke proves the body may tire of holding up the sky, but it still sings. This is a book to read aloud, to recognise yourself in and to rest with when the sky feels too heavy.
Ultimo Press, 304pp, $29.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
October 18, 2025 as “beautiful changelings”.
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