ANIMAL AFTERLIFE

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.