Being Animal

A love for wild nature suffuses this beautiful collection. Poetry can serve no more important purpose than to rekindle our love of those who are wild.-Derrick Jensen, author of A Language Older than Words and EndgameTerri Glass celebrates, grieves and finally embodies the hearts of animals in love poems that playfully and urgently encourage us to become all of who we are. Glass challenges us to enter our bodies like a bee that "drops / into a poppy's cup." "What part of you ... kills the flight of your imagination?" we are asked. Where do humans falter when we separate ourselves from the wild? Here animals become a metaphor for seeing new ways of being. Glass emerges in one poem as an owl, wanting "to see in the dark, be the dark, be inside out / blackness," wanting all her thoughts to dissolve. Dive into the wonderful poems of Being Animal, a book that may well become a classic. Expect to be changed. -Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge, author of poemcrazy: freeing your life with wordsBy turns exuberant and down to earth, humorous and deadly serious, Terri Glass' s poems are all sharply observant of the natural world and human experience. These are wide-open windows on nature, framed with steady artistry. You feel the breezes of summer on your face, and breathe the rich scents of grasses and shorelines. Just when you think nothing much is happening, everything comes clear.I'm most taken by the creatures that make Being Animal their home. From the grace of "Violet Green Swallows," to the tidal tragedy of "Sea Stars," to archetypal "Snake Woman," here is a totemic menagerie that invites your own imagination to evolve new ways of inhabiting a once-familiar world.-William Carney, author of Mountain, an Evolutionary Epic