New Book :: Animal Afterlife

Animal Afterlife by Jaya Stenquist
Airlie Press, September 2022

The voices of near-extinct animals create troubled echoes in Jaya Stenquist’s debut collection, Animal Afterlife, winner of The Airlie Prize 2021. In fragmented reincarnations, these poems reach for the limits of humanity, the boundaries of species, and the laws of embodiment. Here, sensations become the mechanism for insight. With lithe lyric power, Stenquist builds a world of impossibilities, a language for the binturong, the eyeless spider, the siren of Canosa, and wild ponies of England; communications and intermingling with the human that can never be preserved, only imagined. As the Earth continues to change during its Sixth Great Extinction, Animal Afterlife creates an archive of spellbinding ghosts.

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