81 pages
Published 2023
Read from January 1 to January 2
Rating: 4 out of 5
A rich and wondrous book of ecopoetics, The Animals of My Earth School weaves and lingers to listen to animals both delicate and vast. Ants are as important as gazelles, and both have much to impart if we cared to be quiet long enough to hear them — lessons on sex and loneliness, society and control, birth and nurturing, persuasion and predation. Human existence feels ungainly in comparison, an essential something left behind, perhaps, when we lost our tails.
Animals bring color and sound into our lives, a vitality human technology cannot match. “Do they have any cares,” Barya asks in “Why I Wake Early,” “or is this / what it means to belong to the Universe?”
A running list of particular favorites:
“Giant Stag Beetles”
“The World Is Necessary, Even for Little Ants”
“Locusts”
“Heads Are Unnecessary for Copulation”
“Moon Dog”
“City of Antelope”
“The Heart, the Heart, the Hunger”
“The Lost Bull”
“The Human-headed Lion Seduces Three Lambs”
“Falling in Love”
“Little Wren”
“Factors”
“Dream of Lizard Solidarity”
“The Hyena”
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