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Human Heartbeat Detected is a collection of essays that explores how we are wonderfully and terrifyingly human. Hitting on themes such as trauma, emotional abuse, marriage, mental illness, and grief, these essays delve into how humans are simultaneously beautiful and terrible to one another. Though regardless of how we might make each other shatter, our hearts continue beating—even when we might not want them to—and we wade through the wreckage of our lives to find ways to survive. With exquisite language and captivating storytelling, the essays in Human Heartbeat Detected face what it means to be human.

 

“Chelsey Clammer’s Human Heartbeat Detected pulses with energy, peril, sexuality, and fearless compassion. These innovative essays, many of them in flash form, push at the boundaries of conventional prose, while at the same time pushing toward revelation and understanding.” ~ Dinty W. Moore, author of To Hell With It

 

“It’s rare to read a book as daring and alive as Human Heartbeat Detected. Chelsey Clammer isn’t afraid to take us to the darkest places, but it’s always in service of ongoingness, a deep belief in love and what it exacts of us. How do we live in the wake of catastrophe? Every sentence here strobes with the light of that question.”

—Paul Lisicky, author of LATER and THE NARROW DOOR

 

“In Human Heartbeat Detected, Chelsey Clammer’s innovative and gripping essay collection, trauma lives side-by-side with possibility. Lives are fractured, yes—by assault, abuse, self-harm, mental illness, suicidal acts—but, as the narrator reminds us, “fractured is better than shattered.” Like trauma, which “isn’t a linear experience” but rather “loops,” Clammer’s essays bend and twirl and spiral and twist, transforming pain into art.” –Rebecca McClanahan, author of In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays and The Tribal Knot: A Memoir of Family, Community, and a Century of Change.

A lyric, cyclical and inventive form of narrative, Circadian explores the intersection of objectivity and the poetics of our bodies.

“A compassionate and self-reflective narrator, weaving the personal into experiments with form…Clammer has successfully bridged genres here while exploring difficult subjects.”

–Publisher’s Weekly

Published October 3, 2017

Winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Award, Circadian is a collection of essays that weaves together personal account with cultural narrative, only to unravel them and explore the brilliant and destructive cycles of who we are. Using poetic language and lyric structures, Clammer dives into her stories of trauma, mental illnesses, and a wide spectrum of relationships in order to understand experience through different frameworks of thought. Whether it’s turning to mathematics to try to solve the problem of an alcoholic father, the history of naming to look at sexism, weather to re-consider trauma, or even grammar as a way to question identity, these “facts” move beyond metaphor, and become new ways to narrate our cyclical ways of being.

 

Reviews of Circadian:

Publishers Weekly

Kirkus

 

“In these beautifully written essays, Clammer considers the intricate, confounding, and powerful connections between story and body, narrative and physical form. She examines the subject of trauma through a series of innovative frames, casting a fearless and curious gaze on her material and bringing new insights to life.”―Marya Hornbacher, New York Times bestselling author of Wasted (Pulitzer Prize finalist)

 

“In sharp, beautiful language, Chelsey Clammer creates elegant, intimate prose about the violence of being female, being a daughter, the way PTSD engraves itself upon us, altering us body and mind, majorly shaping our experience of our own lives. A powerful book.”―Michelle Tea, author of Valencia and Chelsea Whistle

In her debut essay collection, Chelsey Clammer dives flesh-first into finding her home. But these essays aren’t about places, but a state of mind-when you’re at home in your body, you’re at home in the world. With both lyricism and wit, Clammer uses her body to explore a complicated history of assault, addictions, mental illnesses and sexuality. Ranging from hilarious to chilling, the powerful prose in BodyHome drives our bodies back home.

“Clammer’s raw voice and her rich use of language give her stories a rare authenticity and authority, demanding that the reader follow her in a bold, brash exploration of the nonfiction form. Her work is playful, furious, passionate, electric, and truly brave.”
–Marya Hornbacher (Author of Wasted and Madness)

“On her journey to inhabit her elusive self, Chelsey Clammer drives straight into the
body’s complex ecstasies and denials. The path she clears along the way opens into
language rich with honesty, shining with compassion, and present to the chaos of
addiction, rage, and grief. In the end, the place at which she arrives—the body she’s
been carrying with her all along—shelters a new and tender vitality.” –Lia Purpura
(Author of On Looking and Rough Likeness)