Overview

Terms of Venery, the collective nouns used to denote a group of animals or birds, are reconsidered in this new collection of poems by Paula J. Lambert. Here, she confronts disasters of every kind-those ahead of us and those we might be forced to admit we've already been dealing with for decades. In Terms of Venery, Revised, the personal and the collective are ever intertwined, and ignoring any part of that ""sacred singularity"" can only do more damage. This, says Lambert, is the lesson we're sent here to grasp.

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9781962405447

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Reviews

Paula J. Lambert's poems in this arresting collection conjure new names for our broken inheritances: a perdition of priests, an extinction of birds, a miracle of matriarchs. The speaker moves through ecological collapse and the quiet devastations of ordinary life with a voice that is lyrical, sharp-edged, and deeply compassionate; they bear witness to holiness, violence, and the human ache. Reverent and revelatory, Terms of Venery, Revised quietly explores the fragile yet enduring connections between human and nonhuman worlds.-Amy Newman, author of On This Day in Poetry HistoryTerms of Venery, Revised compels us to look at the world and really pay attention. From the humbling vastness of the universe, to the chaotic detritus of a tornado's aftermath, to the tiny broken body of a dead juvenile robin in her driveway, Lambert's gaze never flinches, even when looking away might be the easier choice. In the end, her poems teach us the importance of recognizing and naming those things that so often go unnamed then show us how to navigate, survive, and grow from the natural disasters that forever mark the landscape our lives.-Kip Knott, author of The Other Side of Who I AmBirds flit and soar and even, damaged via our carelessness, dance on one leg through Paula J. Lambert's Terms of Venery, Revised. As the long poem ""Stringfoot"" puts it, ""If we all understood what the birds are telling us, / what the birds are showing us, / we all might come to understand love at its finest."" These poems show us how ""we can dive and dance through the gloaming."" How, in this world we should love and need to love better than we do, the kind of sustained attention that language well-used, as it is in these startling poems, provides can make room for the possibility that such love might make this world ""look like a place you might want/to stay for a while."" And that in reaching ""out to what the world is"" we might become, metaphorically, ""Paleolithic cave dwellers//leaving our mark, pretending/some part of this will last."" This new book is full of marvelous language and poetry filled with the stunningly perceptive, persuasive pretense of art.-George Looney, author of The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible

Author Information

Paula J. Lambert has published four previous full-length poetry collections including As If This Did Not Happen Every Day (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2024). She has authored six chapbooks, including Sinkhole (Bottlecap Press 2025). Lambert, also a literary translator, was awarded the 2021 PEN America - L'Engle Rahman Prize for Mentorship. Her work has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is the 2023 winner of the Slippery Elm Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club's Amy Lowell Prize, was awarded a 2021 Editor's Choice Award from Sheila-Na-Gig Online, and was the 2019 winner of the Heartland Broadside Series. Lambert owns Full/Crescent Press, a small publisher of poetry books and broadsides, through which she has founded and supported numerous public readings and festivals that support the intersection of poetry and science, including the Sun & Moon Festival now hosted by the Ohio Poetry Association. She lives in Columbus with her husband, Dr. Michael Perkins, a philosopher and technologist. More at www.paulajlambert.com.

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