absolute animal

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 also serves on the national steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action (WDA).

"DeWoskin’s second poetry collection, absolute animal, subtly exposes the thin line separating humans from other living things, those inarguable similarities to the earth and how they lead us to long for its connection. She has a way of questioning and erasing the distance we insist is there.  . . . Throughout her persistent, startling collection, the poet also fuels meaning into womanhood, and everything that’s lost or gained from being female.  . . . absolute animal is a graceful reminder of why links to other living things matter and why examining the human experience is one of our only respites from what we cannot change."

• anthrosphereattentionthe animal questionsestina for the snake in a man-made lakeways to love and leave you social hour vole  when we say they    hunt unseasonable    chemical peel  taxidermy   heathkit tv 1980my dad’s socially distant heart surgery his meds      arrhythmia     feel it if    these days i keep falling        backestrangementpoem on returning (by he zhizhang)on the eve of government exams to secretary zhang (by zhu qingyu)climbing white stork tower (by wang zhihuan)     halfway (by li bai)   drinking alone under the moon (by li bai)    snapshots of what’s called for   some girls    dressing    let me bevanitya surgeon sawed me open, sewed me updouble body, hot lasagna    taunting the turkey vultures with love        tiny staples    fear    chance, chicago    sunset/sonnet    airplane landscape, 1992, true storylandingdream view from aboveyour deathtenacityacknowledgments