Overview

To understand anything-or to attempt to-is to discover how distinctions and similarities conflux, flip, muddle, resist, meld, blur, and reflect. Boundaries are plastic if not arbitrary, the world and its inhabitants are fragile, everything is interconnected and Zoodikers: A Bestiary is Flower Conroy's endeavor to write through and towards this. Part personal inventory, part existential dread meditation, part hope anthem, this collection of prose poems ferociously explores the realities bedeviling its speakers: aging, the body, sickness, extinction, sex and sexuality, queerness, life, birth, childlessness, death, the future, the past, AI, what is human as well as what is animal. Juxtaposing syntax and musicality, language play and gallows humor, acute observations and philosophic wonderings, myth, superstition, and fact, Conroy invokes and evokes questions of what it means to be human or animal or other. Feral, perturbed, zany, scrutinizing, these poems shapeshift; appearances aren't necessarily fixed and animation is questionable-from what is life, what is death, what's in between, to how to determine degrees of consciousness: isn't a chemical process a type of cognition? What is the nature of being in a coma? What's this centipede thinking? The poems are microcosms unto themselves and yet interwoven through subtext, concern, and voracity of information and imagination. Lucidity slips into hallucinatory and vice versa as Conroy navigates what it means to be alive in this weird and wild shared existence.

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9781597322201

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Reviews

""Conroy is a kind of surrealist but is not nostalgic for the surrealism of old. Her political resistance, which instigates the writer or artist into radical uses of the imagination, is undeniably present tense. She constructs meaning with the authoritative and associative mind of the gods who erected the universe and stuck name tags on its flora and fauna."" -Diane Seuss, Author of Modern Poetry ""Zoodikers: A Bestiary is a kooky naturalist's exhibit in which every poem is an animal panting in the Anthropocene mirror. The book's title-a Victorian exclamation-suits this wildly abundant lyric trip propelled by exuberant diction and syntactical muscularity."" -L.J. Sysko, Author of The Daughter of Man ""In Flower Conroy's Zoodikers: A Bestiary, she conducts poetic experiments, but she also takes readers on a trip to view a collection of creatures-a bestiary-which she has arrayed before us and which she describes in ways that are joyful, a little hectic, adorned, lavish, untamed."" -Mark Wunderlich, Author of God of Nothingness ""These poems are a gumbo of fable, myth, and imagination used to test the boundaries of our consciousness, as the poet strives for opus maximus, to change myself by changing the world."" -Nick Makoha, Author of Kingdom of Gravity ""Reading Flower Conroy's Zoodikers: A Bestiary is an exhilaration. I marvel at the leaps and swerves that animate each of the prose poems in this collection and feel as if, in Conroy's hands, the English language has quadrupled in size. Conroy's ecstatic voice creates a vertigo of beauty and strangeness. Filled with praise and lament, these poems combine personal history, empathy, and otherworldliness with pyrotechnic perception."" -Catherine Barnett, Author of Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space ""Flower Conroy's explosive new collection of prose poems is tender, animalistic, and a feminist phenomenon. Lush with language, Conroy is surreal, loquacious, and hilarious. She explores the landscape of women's experience through the lens of beast, grueling and complete with agency. Through animal, Conroy identifies the base self, and it's an extraordinary ride."" -Tracey Knapp, Author of Mouth ""Zoodikers is a major book, in the middle of itself and our world. Empathy, humanity, and inventiveness share space in this remarkable compendium of life, a bestiary that is part encyclopedia, part taxonomy, and part grimoire. It's a startling achievement for Conroy, bringing us to our own interjection of surprise, and up there with the best books I've read in years."" --Jodi Johnson, Co-Judge for The Richard Mathews Prize for Poetry

Author Information

LGBTQIA+ artist, former Key West Poet Laureate, and NEA and MacDowell Fellow, Flower Conroy's the author of ""Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder"" (NFSPS's Barbara Stevens' contest winner), ""A Sentimental Hairpin,"" ""Greenest Grass"" (Lynx's House Press' Blue Lynx Prize winner), and ""And Scuttle My Balloon,"" co-authored with Donna Spruijt-Metz. Conroy has led workshops at/for The Studios of Key West, La Romita School of Art, Write Here, Write Now, and others. In addition to care-giving and free-lancing editing, Conroy is working on a series of Ephemeral Altars-impermanent assemblage art pieces that visually evoke and celebrate poetry collections, which can be found on their social media.

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