midnight bestiaries

’We have always been imaginary, ’ declares this mesmerising collection from Trinidadian writer Andre Bagoo. In prose poems that make use of the liminal qualities of the form - and anticipate the book’s second half - readers travel across ideas of the bestiary as mythic repository and realist document of social critique. Trinidad and Tobago looms large, but so too writing, loving, and reckoning with subjugations through transformations. The collection’s heart is an extended erasure of Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle, a gesture inspired by critical theorists such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Kevin Ohi. Releasing queer desire from within James’s prose, there is something sensual, even romantic, about this incursion into source text, which sings against larger, global absences. ’Eventually, ’ Bagoo triumphantly declares, ’we dream the real.’