2023 read #4: Preparing Dinosaurs for Mass Extinction by Rena Su.

Preparing Dinosaurs for Mass Extinction by Rena Su

28 pages

Published 2021

Read January 7

Rating: 4 out of 5

This is a lovely little poetry chapbook: hand-bound, cover decorated with a tyrannosaur skull done with stencil and glue and sand, printed in a batch of 100 copies. I've had it since spring 2021, and I've been wanting to read it for longer than that. Rena Su used to be a fixture in my corner of indie poet Twitter, before she faded away from social media altogether, and she spent months talking about the "dino chap" and its journey to publication. Being an absolute goober for dinosaurs as well as an emerging poet myself, I felt half-feral waiting for it.

But I haven't read it until now, for a silly reason: my policy on how long a book can be for me to read and review it here. Early on, I had settled on 50 pages as the smallest possible book that I could justify calling a "read" (in the noun sense). No matter how lovely, a hand-bound poetry chapbook would never reach that threshold. But on the other hand, I want to review every book I read. It took until the mental housecleaning of this blog's 10th anniversary for me to toss out that rule. From now on, if I want to count a text as a "read" (in the noun sense), I'm counting it.

The other day, someone on writer Twitter coined the term "Adroit-core" for a certain form of contemporary poetry, often produced by young (usually femme or trans/queer) poets: a mix of intellectual remove (used as an ironic narrative device) and deeply personal, often confessional sentimentality. I've dabbled in this form myself, and certainly find it an appealing descriptor rather than a scornful one (though there is a cadre of traditional masculinist poets who find ways to scorn what they call "witchy teen trauma poetry" -- writer Twitter is a realm of contrasts).

Preparing Dinosaurs has its share of "Adroit-core" motifs: death, descriptions of bodily dismemberment employed as metaphors for emotional wounds, religious trauma (or trauma couched in religious terms). Most of the time, the results are transcendent. "Broken Abecedarian of Prehistoric Burial" brilliantly floats through (and subverts) its own format. "Asteroid" closes with some of my personal favorite lines of poetry: "i hope / the asteroid will fall gently / and take quickly / i / wish i could stop this." "To Mummify Myself Alongside an Epilogue" was a masterpiece and quickly had me in tears.

With Rena's (understandable) withdraw from social media, it's a shame that this book will never reach many readers. Truly, Preparing Dinosaurs is an inspiration -- I'm in the midst of writing and revising my own prehistory chapbook, full of science and my own traumas, and this book has given me so much energy and determination to bring my chap to the world. If Rena ever comes back around in a public way, you can bet that I'll request to reprint a good handful of these poems in upcoming volumes of The Mesozoic Reader.