Bestiary
About this book
"The poems in Elise Paschen's Bestiary explore domestic preoccupations set against the backdrop of the wild-heartedness, real and imagined, of the animal world," praises the poet Jason Shinder. In this modern-day Bestiary, or "Book of Beasts," the line between animal and human is thinly-drawn – the daughter of a Celtic king, through love, is transformed from beast to human; lovers take flight as moon and owl; manatees transform, before the explorers' eyes, into mermaids. This dynamic runs throughout the collection: taking flight, hovering between air and earth, plunging, and then resurfacing from water. The poems create a constant engagement between what tethers us to our daily lives – marriage, motherhood, raising a family, the loss of parents in old age – and the desire for other worlds. Exploring notions of transformation, these poems cross thresholds between animal and human, between death and life.
Award-winning poet, Elise Paschen, creates in her third and most complex poetry collection, work which is elegant and passionate, preternaturally still and reckless all at once. Paschen displays a variety of form and nuance – from ghazals to long-lined free verse poems. Writing out of a distinct Western literary tradition, but tapping into her Native American (Osage) roots, Paschen celebrates the mythic, the unusual, the magical glimpsed in the everyday.
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Information
Table of contents
- I
- Monarch
- Engagement
- Moving In
- Barn Owl and Moon
- Fertility
- Trapeze
- Birth
- The Flycatcher’s Fall
- Prey
- Miss Spider’s Guests
- Hive
- Sanctuary
- Under Siege
- II
- Wi´-gi-e
- Warning Signs
- Afterward
- Behind the Swan
- Ghost-Echo
- Disappearing Act
- Solstice in Snow
- Pond in Winter
- Sea-Change
- Isthmus
- Squibnocket
- Chancing Upon the Manatees
- Raccoon on a Branch
- III
- The Broken Swan
- Ash
- Crossing
- Eurydice
- Mary of Magdala
- Outside the Tomb
- Farewell
- Under the Dome
- Cicadas
- Cradle-Song
- Threshold
- Feast for the Living
- First Snow
- Magnificent Frigatebird
