Manatee/Humanity
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A fascinating work from an internationally renowned poet
Anne Waldman's new investigative hybrid-poem explores the nuances of inter-species communication and compassion. It draws on animal lore, animal encounters (with grey wolf and manatee), dreams, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and Buddhist ritual to render a text of remarkable sympathy, reciprocity, and power. The poem asks questions as well as urges further engagement with the endangered (including our human selves). Part performance litany, part survival kit, part worried mammalian soundings, Waldman explores, as ever, what it means to inhabit our condition through language and imagination inside a wheel of time. This is the mature work of a philosophical field poet with a shamanic metabolism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This sprawling book-length poem from an American countercultural giant takes its form and concerns from a Tibetan Buddhist ritual and from the poet's close encounter with the endangered aquatic mammal of her title. This visionary verse and prose attempts "to describe the known world of any reach or stretch of imagination/ the relative world of death & change"; to praise the resources, but also to limn the limits, of ecological science, of all Western ways of knowing; and to imagine the whole of human and prehuman history, from the "humdrum Paleolithic" across "20,000 years of 'keeping' time once keeping it for all & moving it, time, forward, & it, the art, forward, & it, humanity, forward, & now they want to kill it really they killed it." Waldman's energetic odes and dialogues, part memory and part dream, may learn from the manatee "what it is to be human"; they also try to understand the nonhuman, from seaweeds and seashells to mammals, asking, "re minds possible without language?" and answering that they must be. Exuberant as always though detractors will call her undisciplined Waldman figures the gap between mind and body as the gap between air and sea, between the manatee's world and our own.
