Overview

The poems in Patrick Cahill's If we are the forest the animals dream delight in their invention, at times enigmatic and surreal, at times brimming with longing and absence, always penetrating in their precision and astonishing in their turns of phrase. The iconic image of a footbridge in Mexico with which the collection opens establishes a motif these poems revolve around: the liminal realms we traverse alone from mystery to mystery. Other poems seek reconnection in nature and the animals of the title, in music, and in the landscapes and myths of the American West. Ultimately, this is a collection about language, the bridge with which we suture the fragments of our experience and our world.

Full Product Details

9781939639417

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Patrick Cahill's The Machinery of Sleep (Sixteen Rivers Press) appeared in 2020. His poems have twice won the Central Coast Writers Award. A cofounder and editor of Ambush Review, a San Francisco-based literary and arts journal, he was also a contributing editor for the anthology Digging Our Poetic Roots: Poems from Sonoma County (WordTemple Press). He received his PhD in the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and wrote a study of Whitman and visual experience in nineteenth-century America. Portions of this work have appeared in The Daguerreian Annual and Left Curve. Cahill lives in San Francisco, where he volunteers with San Francisco Recreation and Parks in habitat restoration.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available