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Overview"A National Poetry Series winner, selected and with a foreword by Kwame Dawes. A 5-part series of interwoven poems from a dying parent to her daughter, examining the human capacity for grief, culpability, and love, asking- do we as a species deserve to survive? Dear Specimen opens with both its speaker and her planet in peril. In ""Speak to Me,"" she puzzles over a millipede, as if the blue rune of its body could help her understand her impending death and the crisis her species has created. Throughout the collection, poems addressed to specimens echo the speaker's concern and amplify her wonderment. A catalog of our climate transgressions, Dear Specimen's final poem foretells a future in which climate refugees overrun one of our planet's last habitable places. The collection's lifeblood is a series of poems in which the speaker and her daughter express their concern for, and devotion to, one another. The daughter's questions mirror the ones her mother asks of specimens- what are we meant to do with so much hazard and wonder? When the speaker hints at the climate crisis in a bedtime story she tells her grandson, we, too, feel the peril he may face. Juxtaposing a profound sense of intimacy with the vastness of geological time, the collection offers a climate-conscious critique of the human species-our search for meaning and intimacy, our capacity for greed and destruction. Dear Specimen is an extended love letter and dire warning, not only to the daughter its speaker leaves behind but to all of us." Full Product DetailsAuthor: W.J. HerbertPublisher: Beacon Press Imprint: Beacon Press Weight: 0.367kg ISBN: 9780807007594ISBN 10: 0807007595 Pages: 120 Publication Date: 05 October 2021 Audience: General/trade , General Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: To order  Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us. Table of ContentsForeword by Kwame Dawes I A Homo Sapiens on the Brink of Extinction Speaks to the Fossil Mosasaurus Lyuba Speak to Me After a Miscarriage, My Daughter Asks Millipede Aerial View Least Tern Seamless Bead Embryonic Daughter Fragile Eagle II Mounting the Dove Box Resin Specimen Dark Season Dusky and Zigzag Salamanders The Seer Nautiloid After My Diagnosis, Sarah Asks Water Scorpion, Magnified 40x Waterfowl, Dovekie White-Tail III Celestial Mechanics American Beaver After His Nightmare, Sarah Asks Fledgling Speciesism Squander Tipping Point Errant Eagle Put Bones in Pit When Finished If Oil Rigs Raise You Like Lazarus from the Shale of the Permian Basin IV Abnormal Echo Before the Bonfire Bridge Constructs in Modern Technology Cardinal, You Would Not Believe Hybrid A Pastoral Topography Riddles of Flock & Bone Homo Sapiens In the End, Sarah Asks Shanidar, First Flower People V The Smell of Almost Rain Sea Lily At the Museum of Permian Extinctions Triage American Copperhead After My Burial, Sarah Asks Dear Specimen Day Shift/Night Shift At the Sea Floor Exploration Exhibit, Sarah Asks Epilogue: To a Trilobite AcknowledgmentsReviewsHerbert writes movingly about a world of extinction, using the lenses of fossils and storytelling to create an involving worldview. . . . The writer's gift for deep seeing elevates even the smallest of details. . . . In mostly short poems, Herbert describes a vibrant yet highly vulnerable world. . . . She breathes life into fossils, skeletons, and nature today, even our world in its current damaged state. A unique and thrilling collection that pulses with wonder; not to be missed. -Library Journal Author InformationW. J. Herbert's work was awarded the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize and was selected by Natasha Trethewey for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2017. Her poetry, fiction, and reviews appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, Hudson Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she was raised in Southern California where she earned a bachelor's in studio art and a master's in flute performance. She lives in Kingston, New York, and Portland, Maine. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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