My third book and first major publication, Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts, is forthcoming from Archway Editions in October 2023. Pre-order a copy here. A poetry chapbook and accompanying video game, Woebegone, is also forthcoming from Theaphora Editions. In 2021, I contributed a foreword to The One on Earth (Fence Books), Mark Baumer's posthumous selected works. My first two books, Burial (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2013) and The Second Body (Poor Claudia, 2016), are out of print.



Selected Works:

"The Analyst" at The Chicago Review
"Deep Tissue" at FENCE
Five Pieces at The Brooklyn Rail
"The Only Person You Hurt Is Yourself" at Forever
Excerpt from "Deep Tissue" at Forever
"Your Body Must Be Heard: On Peggy Ahwesh and Jacqueline Goss's OR119" for Ahwesh, Gosh, and Anthology Film Archives
"The Impossible Possible", an introduction to The One on Earth: Selected Works of Mark Baumer (Fence Books, 2021)
"Potted Rubber Trees: A Correspondence with Jamie Stewart" at GoldFlakePaint
"My Ex-Husband's Doppelganger" at A) Glimpse) Of)
"Donnie Darko" at Fanzine
Four poems at BOMB
"The Thought Has a Mind of Its Own" at PLINTH
Five Poems at Folder "It Would've Been a Shame to Let Some Other Woman Have It: On Joanna Newsom's Divers" at Fanzine
"25 Points on Amina Cain's Creature" at HTMLGiant
"Everyone Please Stop Listening to the Money: An AOL Instant Messenger Interview with Mark Baumer" at HTMLGiant
Interview with Shayla Lawz at The Creative Independent
"Lingua Ignota's Liturgical Noise is a Celebration of Obliteration" at Noisey (VICE)
"Punching Bag" at Territory
"Thirst" at Fanzine
"Wish You Were Here: The Perks of Being Banned" at PEN America
"Horse: A Triptych" at Bennington Review
"Stranger Situation" at The Believer
Two Pieces in Fonograf's print edition, FE


And here are some generous words about my writing:

Claire Donato's patient, immersive meditation on death and mourning designed in precise urn-like prose, Burial, fledges itself with the poise of Woolf or Loy or Carson; a kind of humming, marbled elegy for the as-yet-extant-alive, and like finding a real river in a dictionary.
Blake Butler, author of Alice Knott and Molly

A full and vibrant illustration of the restless turns of a mind undergoing trauma. Language here serves both as escape and as a threat, at once suspect and yet the only consolation. In Burial, Donato makes and unmakes the world with words, and what is left shimmers with pain and delight.
Brian Evenson, author of Fugue State and Windeye

In her captivating book, Donato follows grief logic into a space of defamiliarization, speaking of death, television, rooms, love, nouns and voices as if confronting them for the first time. The language loops, stepping back to move forward, always circling a mind aware of its movements. It's a gorgeous fugue, an unforgettable progression, a telling I cannot shake.
—Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book

Generous, violent, open, and dark, The Second Body continuously lays clear a self-other, and that self-other continuously extends into the universe. As a person, and a reader, I feel very thankful for that, to be in that kind of space, in that kind of literature.
Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night and Indelicacy

When a speaker in Claire Donato's poem "Grief Interlude" says, "I care in different meanings, none of / Which are paraphrasable," we're getting to the root of these poems, which will try everything to articulate the broken and reverent heart that made them. These poems are thick with music and formally rangy and sort of amazing for the things they actually did to me, among which: hurt; puzzle; astonish; delight. Which is to say—they moved me. They move me. Hard to paraphrase that too. 
Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy

What is The Second Body? Alice in the pit of despair, humming pop songs and practicing inversions. The ocean, sex, void, women. Dead chickens. "Doves at the edge of the lake / Falling across the age of the computer." A bomb going off on the patriarchy. Gloom and glee, bones and teeth: this is how Claire Donato is trying to describe the world to you.
Kate Durbin, author of E! Entertainment

Claire Donato is a rare and beguiling voice. I am tempted to call her a sincere trickster—the love-child of Joseph Cornell and Carrie Brownstein, perhaps. There is great rigor beneath her verse, and her themes—the body in pain, supplementarity, simulacra, sexuality as textuality, the flexible borders of species-being—are striking in the precision of their arrangements, and the delicacy of their assembly, suspended between the suggestive and the vivid. "There are ways in which to see inside a person's body using text," she writes, and her second body—an uncanny, rewarding companion—is well worth listening to.
Dominic Pettman, author of Love and Other Technologies

Claire Donato's The Second Body answers and deepens the anxiety that I can't stop feeling and that poetry like hers can't stop making us feel. "I Will Not Die Here," "The Pleasure of Tearing Down the Forest," "Off to the Nervous Museum"—titles that unnerve you, set over writing that remains unnerving and yet is remarkably studied, political, socially engaged—particularly with the making and remaking of the female subject, necessarily and unashamedly sexualized, but in edgy, productively discordant registers.
John Cayley, P=R=O=G=R=A=M=M=A=T=O=L=O=G=Y