The Animal in the Room

"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. Deer are a way of putting fear and trauma outside yourself; a wolf character whose main purpose was not understanding anything people feel."--