Absolute Animal

Poems that traverse and question the lines between human and animal behavior.

Experimenting with time, language, and transgressing boundaries, the poems in absolute animal lean into Nabokov's notion that precision belongs to poetry and intuition to science.

Rachel DeWoskin's new collection navigates the chaos of societal and mortal uncertainty. Through formal poetry, DeWoskin finds sense amid disorder and unearths connections between the animal and the human, between the ancient and the contemporary, and between languages, incorporating translations from poems dating as far back as the Tang dynasty. From sonnet sequences about heart surgeries to examinations of vole romance and climate change, absolute animal investigates and moves across boundaries and invites us to consider what holds life, what lasts, what dies, and what defines and enriches the experience of being human.


Author: Rachel DeWoskin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 11/21/2023
Pages: 80
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.79lbs
Size: 9.50h x 6.80w x 0.30d
ISBN13: 9780226829050
ISBN10: 0226829057
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | General

About the Author
Rachel DeWoskin is the author of five critically acclaimed novels: Banshee; Someday We Will Fly; Blind; Big Girl Small; and Repeat After Me; and the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing; along with the poetry collection Two Menus, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Her essays, poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Sunday Times Magazine of London, Condé Nast Traveler, Asian Wall Street Journal, Far Eastern Economic Review, Agni, Ploughshares, New Delta Review, New Orleans Review, Seneca Review, and numerous journals and anthologies. She is on the core creative writing faculty at the University of Chicago and affiliated faculty in Jewish and East Asian Studies. DeWoskin serves on the national steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action (WDA).