Compelling verse that attends to human and nonhuman creatures with equal curiosity.
Stenquist’s debut poetry collection serves as a contemporary bestiary for endangered life.
Albatross, Kākāpō, black-footed ferret—each is an animal that’s threatened by human expansion or climate disruption, and the author treats them with careful curiosity in these poems. Moving through a litany of mammals, birds, and insects, the narrator smoothly takes on the voices of various species, speaking as various fauna without attempting to speak for them. It’s a visceral rendition of creaturely experience, from the binturong’s cadences (“I sway / rhythm of body / air / body / tree”) to the northern hairy-nosed wombat’s delightful proclamation: “here are the things I am willing to give: / my back / the slope of my ass.” At times, the lines between species begin to blur. A Blackburn’s sphinx moth reminisces, “I miss being soft in the world / my time as a kitten in a basket,” and a black rhinoceros crosses into the inorganic, musing, “I am a rock / the earth and I / steady circle onward.” Through metaphor and analogy, different life forms are shown in tightly knotted relationships, with hierarchies dissolving even as the specificity of individual creatures is retained. In one of the epigraphs to the collection, philosopher Thom Van Dooren and anthropologist Deborah Rose argue that “what the current time demands is a genuine reckoning with ourselves as the agents of mass extinction.” This collection serves as a prime example of what such a reckoning might look like—propelled by the urgency of environmental collapse without slipping into didacticism, grappling with the weight of culpability without giving way to fatalism.
Compelling verse that attends to human and nonhuman creatures with equal curiosity.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-950404-09-4
Page Count: 92
Publisher: Airlie Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Breathtakingly magical.
A powerful homage to the natural world, from England by way of Canada.
Combining poetic words (somewhat reminiscent of Mary Oliver’s poetry in their passion for the natural world) with truly stunning illustrations, this unusually beautiful book brings to readers the magic and wonder of nature. This is not a book about ecology or habitat; this is a book that encourages readers to revel in, and connect with, the natural world. Focusing on a particular subject, whether it be animal, insect, or plant, each poem (rendered in a variety of forms) delivers a “spell” that can be playful, poignant, or entreating. They are most effective when read aloud (as readers are encouraged to do in the introduction). Gorgeous illustrations accompany the words, both as stand-alone double-page spreads and as spot and full-page illustrations. Each remarkable image exhibits a perfect mastery of design, lively line, and watercolor technique while the sophisticated palette of warms and cools both soothes and surprises. This intense interweaving of words and pictures creates a sense of immersion and interaction—and a sense that the natural world is part of us. A glossary encourages readers to find each named species in the illustrations throughout the book––and to go one step further and bring the book outside, to find the actual subjects in nature. Very much in the spirit of the duo’s magisterial The Lost Words (2018), this companion is significantly smaller than its sprawling companion; at just 6.5 by 4.5 inches when closed, it will easily fit into a backpack or generously sized pocket. “Wonder is needed now more than ever,” Macfarlane writes in the introduction, and this book delivers it.
Breathtakingly magical. (Poetry. 6-adult)Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4870-0779-9
Page Count: 120
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2020
An odd but sometimes-moving imagining of the nocturnal thoughts of the presidents of the United States.
A fanciful look at the dreams of U.S. presidents throughout history.
Phillips, a painter and multimedia artist, offers readers a mix of fact and fiction in a book that’s not so much about the inner lives as it is about the sleeping lives of America’s leaders. Working backward from Donald Trump to George Washington (including separate essays for each Grover Cleveland administration), Phillips’ essays imagine each man’s dreams about various subjects, include his childhood, his parents, and sex. Each essay attempts to capture the personality of the president at hand, and some bring in the viewpoints of other people, as in a dialogue between John and Abigail Adams or the musings of Zachary Taylor’s horse, Whitey. The chapter on Gerald Ford has a blank space in lieu of an essay, while Millard Fillmore, who was also not elected to the office of president, gets a full examination. The essays’ focuses aren’t always what one might expect; for example, John F. Kennedy’s essay is about living under the shadow of his father’s ambitions, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s is about the women in his life. This multimedia coffee-table book is full of the author’s own full-color paintings and illustrations, painted in styles ranging from surreal to abstract, and their effectiveness varies. Mainly, though, this book highlights the challenges of blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. In his quest to enter the presidents’ dreams, Phillips generally gets the history right and does a good job of capturing the essence of many presidential personalities and relationships. However, some of the sexual references can be overly graphic, as can some bodily descriptions, such as one about Cleveland’s testicles. As a result, this book can be unsettling at times. Still, its imaginativeness makes one wonder what the author would have made of the dreams of the current president, who defeated the man who called him “Sleepy Joe.”
An odd but sometimes-moving imagining of the nocturnal thoughts of the presidents of the United States.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-57-861384-0
Page Count: 215
Publisher: Black Book
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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