The Animal in the Room

Meghan Kemp-Gee's bioengineered poetry explores the relationship between animals and human experiences, such as fear, trauma, and instincts, using repetition and deadpan delivery to amplify the oddity of what is encountered. The collection is highly disciplined and imaginative, and offers a unique perspective on the natural world.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 80 pages
Publication date: 06 July 2023
Publisher: Coach House Books

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 world's 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 what's encountered: arsenic-drunk wildcats, chlorinated orchids, the one painful spot of blue in a deer's eye. I can't say strongly enough how grateful I am to have read this collection; don't miss it.

– Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems

Dimension: 203 x 127 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781552454602