To Learn to Describe the Animal

To learn to describe the animal is a neat meditation on fatherhood, on the politics of place, and on the capacities of poetry to rage against violences of the state and within the home, and the machismo narratives that sustain such abuses. Birds, riot police, and professional wrestlers abound, as well as an (almost) boundless enthusiam for whatever poetry, or one’s relationship to poetry over time, makes possible: a sincere disposition to softness and sadness.