absolute animal
Rachel DeWoskin, in absolute animal, harnesses the list to chart a myriad of deteriorations: in the environment, in health (the speaker’s and her father’s), in a world “post-plague.” The opening poem concludes, “what might moor us back / to earth, so much sweet waste brackish, ask // fracked oil, ask detritus, whales, glaciers we are melting, melting into—.” The sonnet “arrhythmia” opens with a list drawn from “hospital language”: “atrial, cardiac, filial / quick fibrillation, valve, root, arch.” Even “sestina for the snake in a man-made lake” resorts to a list in its cascading finale:
this place—i’m hiding here, boy, boat, blood
gun, present tense a taste, glint, snake not
dead yet, not alive, just over, under, above
This is no maudlin collection. The lists’ momentum serves a distinctive voice and humor, as does the order of poems: “chemical peel” is followed by “taxidermy”—both parenting poems of sorts. We learn that “rodents have perfected monogamy”; the poem “ways to love and leave you” begins, “trick question: do prairie voles love?” Addressing the “social hour vole,” in a poem titled as such, the speaker quips,
at my next obligation, cocktail party, small
talk conversation, just remind me how to roll
less like your slutty antisocial cousins, meadow
voles, who can’t connect. what makes me
human anyway?
Throw in internal rhymes like “buck up” and “fuckup” and DeWoskin’s sensibility is clear.
Yet what could be more “animal” than our mortality, more human than our cognizance of it, as unveiled in “dressing,” in which a trip to the oncologist evokes a sartorial crisis:
i’m a clown because whatever i put on becomes a gown
anyway, and this is the breast guy, so i’ll keep my pants on
{mercy, but what pants?} no shirt or bra though, so I don’t want
underwear visible above my waistline, don’t want
too high-waisted or he’ll have to fuss with buttons
The poem ends with an exchange with the next patient: “you look / beautiful {she was still at the beginning of fear}. i said, so do you.”
