Sign-In
Cart
The Animal in the Room
Paperback
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
ISBN13: 9781552454602
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: May 23 2023
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.40 Width: 5.40 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
LONGLISTED FOR THE GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD
Deer with binoculars, wolves with resumes: bioengineered poetry that unsettles truth, fact, and history.
Animals are strange testing grounds for thinking about subjectivity, language, the body -- really, anything you might want to write a poem about. Together, these poems are an evolutionary chart or a little bestiary - about deer, wolves, evolution, environmental collapse, and extinction. Each one stands alone as a contained organism, but like real animals, they share some genetic material with each other. Considering PTSD and anxiety disorder as a kind of animal experience, a self-protective mechanism, these poems embody the selves we see reflected in the natural world's creatures. Deer are a way of putting fear and trauma outside yourself, wolves a way to understand the instincts of predators.
Oh the pleasure of inhabiting the mind of an animal like Meghan Kemp-Gee! Her poetry is curious, restless, uneasy, and imaginative; it is also highly disciplined, unfolds in precisely measured lines. Watch for brilliant uses of repetition -- the slipperiness of meaning, its ever-doubling character, is on full display, played out in deft linguistic twists. A deadpan delivery amplifies the oddity of what's encountered: arsenic-drunk wildcats, chlorinated orchids, the 'one painful spot of blue' in a deer's eye. I can't say strongly enough how grateful I am to have read this collection; don't miss it. - Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Alighieri, Dante
Pitavy, Francois
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
Smith, Joshua Luke
Hardcover