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Creature is a complex poetics of vitality, and it immaculately cleaves: even as it underscores how living in an inherently inhospitable environment will dispossess us of the world and one another, making animal of man, it sutures the rent evolutionary tree, glorifying the interdependence of each extant thing. Michael Dumanis expertly cultivates the multiplicity of language and makes of “creature” a marvelous contronym; we are a creature as in a beast, debased, beholden to nature, and we are creature as in an extension of creation, improbably sentient, mortal, here. In “Autobiography,” the speaker attests to the contradiction at the root of cognizance: “Am, as an animal, // anxious. Appendages always aflutter, / am an amazing accident: alive.” How does the human mammal embody both and neither — communal and itinerant, leaving home to approach it, as an immigrant and a geographic nomad, as someone’s child and another’s parent, as being and thing? How do we negotiate our ouroboric identities while attuned to not just our own fragility, but an impending global extinction event? The answer is the absence of answer. “In the beginning, I thought a great deal / about death and sunlight, et cetera,” Dumanis admits in “Squalor,” but “The Double Dream of Spring” absolves us of outsmarting impermanence. “O what a ball I had, spending the days.” And what should we do in this vernal brevity but exhaust it? We each only have so long to trace our hand “over the stony bones / that, fused together, hold [our] only face.”

It is rare to find a collection so grounded in the manifold meanings of motherhood—in all its anxiety, ambivalence, and joy. From the aches and fears of pregnancy, through the pain and relief of childbirth, to the perplexing questions and worries of parenting, Rebekah Denison Hewitt grapples with what it is to make a human (and to sometimes lose one), “the baby a creature / in bloom / the mother / a lotus eater.”

Closing with the counsel “Do not be afraid. / Rinse your heart out. Proceed,” these poems give readers many reasons to fear—health issues, genetic deformities, postpartum depression, gun violence, and car accidents. Yet always lurking underneath are light, optimism, and a stubborn willingness to soldier on. Exploring the stories, myths, and personal histories that shape the experience of modern motherhood, Creature in Bloom expands the conversation around what it means to be a mother.

In the summer of 1936, twenty-three-year-old May Swenson boarded a bus heading east out of her Mormon hometown of Logan, Utah. Her destination was New York City, where she had a single goal: become a poet. Creature tells the story of how this small-town woman fought to achieve her dreams in the Depression-era big city, keeping a roof over her head and honing her craft as she pursued romantic relationships with both men and women. After decades of struggle, Swenson became one of mid-century America’s most beloved and prolific poets.

What is it that makes her poetry so extraordinary? How did she see and reveal the world? How did she teach the art of poetry? And how does her work interact with her Mormon roots? Readers will learn the answers to these questions and more in this artfully written biography.

In the summer of 1936, twenty-three-year-old May Swenson boarded a bus heading east out of her Mormon hometown of Logan, Utah. Her destination was New York City, where she had a single goal: become a poet. Creature tells the story of how this small-town woman fought to achieve her dreams in the Depression-era big city, keeping a roof over her head and honing her craft as she pursued romantic relationships with both men and women. After decades of struggle, Swenson became one of mid-century America’s most beloved and prolific poets.

What is it that makes her poetry so extraordinary? How did she see and reveal the world? How did she teach the art of poetry? And how does her work interact with her Mormon roots? Readers will learn the answers to these questions and more in this artfully written biography.