Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery

Vera Hadzic is a writer from Ottawa. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, periodicities, Experiment-O, Minola Review, Hexagon Magazine, Crow & Cross Keys, flo., These Days, and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook, Fossils You Can Swallow, was published by Proper Tales Press in 2023. Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery is her first full-length book.

“… The poems in Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery (a stellar title, by the way) are expansive, and meditative; offering interesting rhythms and line-breaks across universes of intimate moments." (rob mclennan’s blog)“The poems in Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery have an astonishing richness to them on par with the most decadent Dutch still-life paintings—and, like those packed canvases, their sumptuousness is shot through with a closeness to death, with the reminder that all bodies are made of ‘tearable gossamer film.’ With penetrative, startling intelligence, Vera Hadzic shows us the insides of things: animals, the great cracking orb of religious belief, our very bones and what they structure and encase. To read this book is to be plunged deep into an ocean of textures, to probe everything from ‘shelves of coiling igneous / rugae’ to the ‘glittering invisibilities of bacterial proliferation.’ Out of the indelible facts of blossoming and decay, Hadzic constructs a gothic Wunderkammer in which ‘a human being/is an encoded/thing—a thing/of domes/and towers.’ Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery is a towering achievement, and with it, Vera Hadzic has established herself as a poetic force of nature.” (Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, author of A Brief History of Fruit)