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Title details for Dear Specimen by W.J. Herbert - Available

Dear Specimen

Poems

#6 in series

by W.J. Herbert
ebook
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A National Poetry Series winner, selected and with a foreword by Kwame Dawes.
A 5-part series of interwoven poems from a dying parent to her daughter, examining the human capacity for grief, culpability, and love, asking: do we as a species deserve to survive?
Dear Specimen opens with both its speaker and her planet in peril. In “Speak to Me,” she puzzles over a millipede, as if the blue rune of its body could help her understand her impending death and the crisis her species has created. Throughout the collection, poems addressed to specimens echo the speaker’s concern and amplify her wonderment. A catalog of our climate transgressions, Dear Specimen’s final poem foretells a future in which climate refugees overrun one of our planet’s last habitable places.
The collection’s lifeblood is a series of poems in which the speaker and her daughter express their concern for, and devotion to, one another. The daughter’s questions mirror the ones her mother asks of specimens: what are we meant to do with so much hazard and wonder? When the speaker hints at the climate crisis in a bedtime story she tells her grandson, we, too, feel the peril he may face.
Juxtaposing a profound sense of intimacy with the vastness of geological time, the collection offers a climate-conscious critique of the human species—our search for meaning and intimacy, our capacity for greed and destruction. Dear Specimen is an extended love letter and dire warning, not only to the daughter its speaker leaves behind but to all of us.

  • Creators

  • Series

    National Poetry

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 5, 2021

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780807007600

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780807007600
      • File size: 2413 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from September 1, 2021

      What secrets do fossils reveal about the past? What clues will we leave for the future from this climate disaster age? What truths do the dying share with the living? In this 2020 National Poetry Series-winning collection, Herbert writes movingly about a world of extinction, using the lenses of fossils and storytelling to create an involving worldview. She presents Lyuba, a baby mammoth excised from the tundra; an extinct bison skeleton; and a jarred tern with a broken spine, as well as current beauties: wisteria winding around an arbor, a bird gracing a sick loved one's window. The writer's gift for deep seeing elevates even the smallest of details; she describes a centipede's legs as "a tiny legion / yoked to the oar." In a lesser writer's hands, these poems might have been dark, even chilling, yet here they often uplift: "Yes, they will let me pet you, / dear Deer." VERDICT In mostly short poems, Herbert describes a vibrant yet highly vulnerable world. Occasionally, the writer focuses too much on scientific nomenclature, but usually she breathes life into fossils, skeletons, and nature today, even our world in its current damaged state. A unique and thrilling collection that pulses with wonder; not to be missed.--Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

      Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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