Meghan Kemp-Gee is the author of The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books), as well as the poetry chapbooks What I Meant to Ask and Things to Buy in New Brunswick. She also co-created the webcomic Contested Strip, recently adapted as a graphic novel, One More Year. She is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and currently resides in North Vancouver BC.

Synopsis

The Animal in the Room

Deer with binoculars, wolves with resumes: bioengineered poetry that unsettles truth, fact, and history. Animals are strange testing grounds for thinking about subjectivity, language, the body ― really, anything you might want to write a poem about. Together, these poems are an evolutionary chart or a little bestiary – about deer, wolves, evolution, environmental collapse, and extinction. Each one stands alone as a contained organism, but like real animals, they share some genetic material with each other. Considering PTSD and anxiety disorder as a kind of animal experience, a self-protective mechanism, these poems embody the selves we see reflected in the natural world’s creatures. Deer are a way of putting fear and trauma outside yourself, wolves a way to understand the instincts of predators.