Before the Beginning

Jodi Cleghorn's latest release, an unorthodox trilogy featuring the cut-up poetry collections Tiny Notes to a Non-Corporeal Lover and Tidal: A Love Story in Five Movements as well as the spec-fic grief memoir Love Beyond Chronology.

Release date: July 2026

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In Tidal: A Love Story in Five Movements, Jodi Cleghorn returns to the cut-up form to explore the complexities of love and second chances. Where desire surges against animosity, memory blurs into longing and time loosens its hold on certainty. Language dissolves and reforms, carrying the reader through cycles of rupture, repair, and the subsequent deepening that makes loving again possible. Built from borrowed texts, yet unmistakably Cleghorn’s voice, these poems take on the nature of water—equally immersive, buoyant and destructive. Accompanied by reworked photography echoing each movement’s tone, Tidal takes you into the undertow of connection, where love is both anchor and undoing.

Tiny Notes to a Non-Corporeal Lovers slips between bodies, timelines, and selves with a restless, lyrical urgency. This cut-up poetry collection combines four separate series: Refraction, Liminal, Denouement and Aperture. Each dismantles and anticipates love, passion, absence and transformation in different ways, reworking borrowed texts in a fiercely original voice. Accompanied by Emma Kirsopp’s haunting artwork, this bookling is a threshold between presence and impossibility, where intimacy is both ritual and revelation. Tiny Notes invites you to find and lose yourself in the shifting cartography of desire.

Love Beyond Chronology 

With artwork by Serani Frisbee

In the not-too-distant future a treatment for grief is engineered, after its individual and societal burden is considered too high. Twenty years later, grief psychosis emerges forcing a new approach. In a cutting-edge trial, a nameless individual navigates the past and the future via a daily lists of eleven moments. Without a clear understanding of who or what they’ve lost, these lists become a tether in uncertainty; a heart that thunders with loss and hope, where grief is equally devastating and beautiful.