Powerful work from a bracingly original poet.
A poet delivers verse for a new world historical era.
Many scientists now say that people are living in the Anthropocene, a time in which the dominant force impacting the environment is human activity. Not so for pioneering feminist scholar Donna J. Haraway, who calls the current period the Chthulucene. For Haraway, the Chthulucene is characterized by a tighter connection between the human and the nonhuman, “inextricably linked in tentacular practices,” as she puts it in her book on the topic, Staying With the Trouble (2016). If this is all sounding pretty academic, it is. Which makes it all the more impressive that Caple is able to distill such dense scholarship into engaging, moving poetry. Readers get some sense of the ways humans and nonhumans are wrapped up together in her opening poem, “I Try Not To Think too Much,” an extended riff on the word “mind.” At the beginning, the piece feels like simple wordplay: “You are your mind / you know your mind / no two know the same mind.” But quickly, readers will realize that the author is on to something bigger: “Do flowers have minds?…speak to my dog’s mind! / things in the garbage have no mind / they do not mind…God is a kind of mind.” Here, “mind” becomes something more than human—and something that dwells in various and unexpected places. Elsewhere in the book, Caple matches words with images, creating pieces that are more collages than poems. One of these is “Wildness,” which features an uncredited photograph of the Canadian poet Pat Lowther pasted over a field of text with words cut out. The cutouts then appear on Lowther’s face, enigmatically forming the phrase “how how is memory a wildness.” The meaning here is elusive, but the effect is real. In this, Caple resembles modernist authors who came before her. Like them, she is able almost magically to build emotional momentum without narrative structure. The effect is mesmerizing.
Powerful work from a bracingly original poet.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-928088-79-0
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Wolsak and Wynn Publishers
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A well-considered exhortation to give a thought to a badly treated bird.
The noted animal-rights ethicist and activist delivers a plea to leave Meleagris gallopavo off the holiday table.
For decades, in league with Francis Moore Lappé and other advocates of plant-based diets, Singer has been writing on the moral standing of animals and their right to live free of pain and terror. That would certainly not apply to the “46 million turkeys killed annually for Thanksgiving dinners,” which, by his account, are raised under appalling industrial conditions until they are “spent,” no longer capable of reproduction, at which point they’re marched off to slaughter. In that killing process, he adds, the indignity continues: sometimes, hung upside down so roughly that their legs are broken, their throats are slit; increasingly, and perhaps even more horrifically, they’re killed by having their holding chambers heated until they succumb to heatstroke. Singer notes that these methods are pretty well uniquely American, since most developed countries, and certainly those in Europe, require that animals be humanely killed, while American producers are subject to no such scruples. “I take the utilitarian view that the right action is the one that does the most to reduce pain and suffering, and increase pleasure and happiness, for all beings capable of having those experiences—in other words, for all sentient beings,” Singer explains. The reader may be shocked enough by his descriptions to adopt the same view, but if not, Singer counsels that the least one can do, if bent on eating turkey at the holidays, is to buy a bird that has been humanely farm-raised and killed—adding, “expect to pay much more for it.” For those willing to go further, he offers recipes for vegetable and tofu dishes that are both appealing and not especially challenging to prepare.
A well-considered exhortation to give a thought to a badly treated bird.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9780691231686
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
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