Kingdom Animalia
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The poems in this highly anticipated second book are elegiac poems, as concerned with honoring our dead as they are with praising the living. Through Aracelis Girmay's lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set of teeth, and language. These are poems about what is both difficult and beautiful about our time here on earth.
Aracelis Girmay's debut collection won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is on the faculty at Drew University and Hampshire College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Girmay's poem "Arroz Poetica," from her 2007 collection Teeth (2007), continues to catalyze antiwar sentiment. This six-part book of verse ends with a short "Ars Poetica" "May the poems be/ the snail's trail.// Everywhere I go,/ every inch: quiet record// of the foot's silver prayer./I lived once./ Thank you./ It was here" that points up its simultaneous strengths and limitations. On the one hand, there's nothing as clear and timely as "Arroz" here; it's almost as if Girmay needed an entire book to write past it and back into a voice that can reflect her own life. On the other, the "foot's silver prayer" of the "Ars" seems, in this collection, to take in a great deal of America and its global history. Girmay has Eritrean, Puerto Rican, and African-American roots; the section titled "a book of erased cities" brings a poignant, multifaceted sense of loss to poems like "Mississippi Burial, On the Ferry to Algiers": "it is possible to wear your ghosts like a face,/ which is to say, my face has been here before." So while there's nothing as immediately gripping and galvanizing here, the book's "snail's trail" offers plenty for the patient.
