Creature

by Michael Dumanis

Creature is a complex poetics of vitality, and it immaculately 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 “Am, as an animal, // anxious. Appendages always aflutter, / am an amazing 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.”

Genres: Poetry

99 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 15, 2023

About the author

Michael Dumanis is the author of two books of poems, Creature (Four Way Books, 2023) and My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; and the co-editor of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande). Born in the former Soviet Union, he emigrated to the United States at the age of five. His recent work appears in American Poetry Review, The Believer, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, The Common, Iowa Review, Poetry, and Waxwing. He lives in North Bennington, Vermont, and teaches at Bennington College, where he also serves as editor of Bennington Review.

Reviews

[Kozbi BC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection. Looking forward to reading more of Dumanis's work.

[Barclay Blankenship · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent — some favorites were “Squalor” “empire of light” and “flag day”