The Animal in the Room
English
By (author): Meghan Kemp-Gee
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 worlds 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 whats encountered: arsenic-drunk wildcats, chlorinated orchids, the 'one painful spot of blue' in a deers eye. I cant say strongly enough how grateful I am to have read this collection; dont miss it. Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems