University of Wisconsin Press, 2017 Paper: 978-0-299-31174-2 Library of Congress Classification PS3612.A586Y68 2017 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
With macabre humor, You, Beast explores the roots and limits of human empathy. Nick Lantz examines our strange, absurd, and often brutal relationship with other animals, from roaches scuttling across the kitchen floor to pigs whose heart valves can replace our own. In poems ranging from found text to villanelles, and from short plays to fables, this lyric collection tracks the troubled ways we define our humanity through mythology, language, politics, art, and food.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Nick Lantz is the author of The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors' House, We Don't Know We Don't Know, and How to Dance as the Roof Caves In. He is the editor of Texas Review, cocurator of thecloudyhouse.com, and an assistant professor of English at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. He has been a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an Emerging Writer Fellow at Gettysburg College.
REVIEWS
"Lantz gives us what we could least have anticipated, then makes it seem the most natural thing in the world." —John Burnside
"Poem by poem, book by book, Nick Lantz is becoming one of our time's best poets. He knows the blades and shrieks and pleasures and sweet sick twists in our human hearts, and this bestiary forces us to look, hard and long, in our own mirrors. 'Polar Bear Attacks Woman ... Horrifying Vid (Click to Watch)' is a poem for this moment in the way Auden and Yeats and Rich and Dickey and Komunyakaa gave us poems for their moments." —Albert Goldbarth
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Over Every Creeping Thing
Posthumanism
The Prisoner
Armadillo, I-45
Stallion: An Epistle
Snake Bites Orit Fox, Israeli Model, on the Breast, Later Dies of Silicone Poisoning
Roach, Kitchen Floor
Randy Johnson Fastball Kills Dove: Spring Training, March 24, 2001
Curiosity Killed the . . .
Grackle, Walmart
Taxidermy: Gift Shop
Fishtank ↓
Snips and Snails
Drawing the Bee
Toyland
Taxidermy: Bobcat Leaping after Pheasant
Natasha
Oh, the Humanity
NO ILLEAGLES HERE
Polar Bear Attacks Woman . . . Horrifying Vid (Click to Watch)
Based on True Events
Was I Ever Wont to Do So unto Thee?
Porcine
Mutton
Balloon Animals
Taxidermy: Fox with Dead Chicken
Fables
Taxidermy: Rabbit School, 1888
The Ass in the Lion’s Skin
Lions Are Fed Donkeys in Baghdad Zoo: YouTube
The Two Pots
If a Lion Could Speak
The Boy and the Snails
The Soldier and the Lion
The Wolf and the Crane
From Tail to the Tooth
Judas Horse
Waiting with the Donkey
Reenactment of the Battle for the Planet of the Apes
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017 Paper: 978-0-299-31174-2
With macabre humor, You, Beast explores the roots and limits of human empathy. Nick Lantz examines our strange, absurd, and often brutal relationship with other animals, from roaches scuttling across the kitchen floor to pigs whose heart valves can replace our own. In poems ranging from found text to villanelles, and from short plays to fables, this lyric collection tracks the troubled ways we define our humanity through mythology, language, politics, art, and food.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Nick Lantz is the author of The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors' House, We Don't Know We Don't Know, and How to Dance as the Roof Caves In. He is the editor of Texas Review, cocurator of thecloudyhouse.com, and an assistant professor of English at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. He has been a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an Emerging Writer Fellow at Gettysburg College.
REVIEWS
"Lantz gives us what we could least have anticipated, then makes it seem the most natural thing in the world." —John Burnside
"Poem by poem, book by book, Nick Lantz is becoming one of our time's best poets. He knows the blades and shrieks and pleasures and sweet sick twists in our human hearts, and this bestiary forces us to look, hard and long, in our own mirrors. 'Polar Bear Attacks Woman ... Horrifying Vid (Click to Watch)' is a poem for this moment in the way Auden and Yeats and Rich and Dickey and Komunyakaa gave us poems for their moments." —Albert Goldbarth
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Over Every Creeping Thing
Posthumanism
The Prisoner
Armadillo, I-45
Stallion: An Epistle
Snake Bites Orit Fox, Israeli Model, on the Breast, Later Dies of Silicone Poisoning
Roach, Kitchen Floor
Randy Johnson Fastball Kills Dove: Spring Training, March 24, 2001
Curiosity Killed the . . .
Grackle, Walmart
Taxidermy: Gift Shop
Fishtank ↓
Snips and Snails
Drawing the Bee
Toyland
Taxidermy: Bobcat Leaping after Pheasant
Natasha
Oh, the Humanity
NO ILLEAGLES HERE
Polar Bear Attacks Woman . . . Horrifying Vid (Click to Watch)
Based on True Events
Was I Ever Wont to Do So unto Thee?
Porcine
Mutton
Balloon Animals
Taxidermy: Fox with Dead Chicken
Fables
Taxidermy: Rabbit School, 1888
The Ass in the Lion’s Skin
Lions Are Fed Donkeys in Baghdad Zoo: YouTube
The Two Pots
If a Lion Could Speak
The Boy and the Snails
The Soldier and the Lion
The Wolf and the Crane
From Tail to the Tooth
Judas Horse
Waiting with the Donkey
Reenactment of the Battle for the Planet of the Apes
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC