Natural History: Poems

by Brandon Kilbourne

A unique work of science and poetry, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Natasha Trethewey

A research biologist at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Brandon Kilbourne illuminates the intersections between science and poetry in poems that demonstrate the wonder, curiosity, and precision required by both disciplines.

Natural History opens by confronting the hidden histories within the study of biology and its links to colonialism, including the revelation that European scientists used slave ships to transport specimens from Africa and the Americas back to Europe. Across the collection, Kilbourne describes how these histories of exploitation are still reflected in dioramas of elephants, rhinoceroses, and African people displayed in natural history museums. Other poems narrate the intricate work of studying fossils, and a longer sequence recounts an expedition above the Arctic Circle to recover evidence of how a fish’s fins gave rise to the diversity of limbs found among amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.

Natural History is a rare and fascinating debut, and Kilbourne’s exquisite eye brings the role of the working biologist to life.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published November 4, 2025

Reviews

[Mariah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Take a walk in Berlin’s Natural History Museum and learn about the stories that are dying to be told throughout this poetry collection. What a unique theme to use for science poetry that works exceptionally well. These are the stories of bones that are not ghosts haunting their spots in the museum but proof stories never do die. This is life behind the bones, behind the science, behind lives lived that some thought would remained buried forever. The prose poetry is the most prominent form throughout this collection and it really generates this epic feeling that these creatures lived.
Memories are not ghosts but an imprint in the bones for eternal adventures to be told. Poems such as “Carrion Knowledge” and “The oceanographer” really show the extent of stories that we learn through science and museums plus the significance of the work these archivists, archaeologists, and oceanographer’s do daily to advance scientific knowledge. There are many aspects of science that are informed by learning about habits from the past and how some things were more effective than others. These are stories that were waiting to be told and finally put on display. You can almost see the exhibits shining through each poem. Science poetry is much more rhythmic and free flowing through the way that Kilbourne utilizes diction here. A fun collection that I wish explored some experimental poetry forms to compliment the work being written here. Thank you Netgalley and Graywolf Publishing for this advanced digital copy.

Read more reviews and recommendations on https://brujerialibrary.wordpress.com/

[Mya Matteo · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A predator is a predator after all, regardless
of the time in Earth’s history—they simply
differ in their habit and the hunt: some
sink their honed teeth into a scaly hide,
a roar professing their territory; others
convene over a landmass map, howling
false claims in English, French, and German."

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Natural History, Brandon Kilbourne merges his experience as both a research biologist and a poet to craft a collection grounded in scientific detail even as it takes flight in language and sound. More than a simple gathering of observations of the natural world, Kilbourne interrogates how so much of our scientific knowledge was built on the backs and bodies and local wisdom of the indigenous peoples who paid a bloody and brutal price for that knowledge even as they were excised from its history and forbidden from expanding on it themselves.
This theme is made clear immediately via the first poem, “The Giraffe Titan”, where Kilbourne introduces the dinosaur exhibition at a Berlin museum, and then through the course of the poem notes how most of the fossils were excavated from the “former German colony of German East Africa,” and how twenty years earlier European powers had met in Berlin to “negotiate their claims to regions of Africa for colonial expansion.” Less directly and more powerfully, he makes a connection between the Jurassic predators stalking, then slicing into their prey … [in] a world beyond our ken, subject to … unremitting savagery” and how those “twenty men in Berlin would carve its continent into plantations, mines, and ivory hunting grounds, their talons manifest in massacres charring within burning villages, famine’s gaunt ribs slowly quelling rebellions, black skin the mouths of ravenous empires.”
Later, Kilbourne explores how many European naturalists made use of slave trade ships to deliver their specimens, writing from the perspective of these “enlightened” individuals who “detest the trade and pity their cargo” but basically shrug and say, oh well, “science must progress.” Though I suppose that speaker at least notes the existence of the “cargo,” whereas another logs how a slave ship went down in a storm — “truly a tragedy”— and then explains why: the crew and captain lost along with specimens of rhinoceros, antelopes, and bats.” No thought at all of the greater number of slaves lost.
This theme runs throughout and is nicely bookended in the final poem “Blindfold Wonder,” which presents Kilbourne working on an aardvark skeleton in the museum as he muses on

The curated forgetting—
Buried in the faceless mess of our silence,
Black omissions whisper from graves left
Unmarked …the shoulders that ported
Crates of specimens, the lips that shared
Knowledge of roots and herbs …
The hands that cleared paths and quarries
All resurface to undermine the blue-eyed fantasy
That the Earth was a naturalist’s birthright to
Tame.

From there Kilbourne moves into the more personal realm:

Though not invisible, I remain a rarity …
[with] a target upon your hide, as
When a revered greybeard takes aim with
His seminar topic — Black people are not as smart as
White people— …just as when among
Attic antlers, a curator makes time to shoot her question — Who are you, and what
Do you think you’re doing — blind to your dangling visitor’s
Badge …

In addition to its exploration of colonialism and racism, the collection also focuses not just on the natural world but on the ongoing tragedy of our impact on it. One piece of evidence for that is
The photo
Of a mountain of bison
Skulls — the buffalo skinner standing on its
summit, boasting
From its bone-stacked height
Of our natural talent

Another is an exhibit in a diorama, “taxidermied feet fill the footprints of a lost species.”
But perhaps no segment makes the case more vividly and movingly than the poem “The Last Sea Cow’s Testimony,” written from the perspective of the lone survivor of the titular creatures. Here it is watching the first encounter between his species and our own not long before we drove them to extinction: “Never in the maw of an orca devouring a calf, neither in the eyes of a cormorant, gullet full of fish, nor in the face of an otter flecked with urchin, had we witnessed anything like their habitual barbarity.” After witnessing the brutal slaying of his mate (presented in vivid detail) and then the humans’ departure, the sea cow thinks at least there will be a return to peace. But then, “the wind at their tail, they dotted the offing, our dwindled herds yet dwindling as more and more they arrived to haul us life-robbed from the water.” Afterward, we’re left with this gut punch of a close: “Now I am the last of the sea cows…I speak a vanishing tongue now no one else understands to spite the silence closing over us forever, entrusting this account to my bones that will litter the seafloor, my eye sockets soon home to crabs who will never glimpse a sea cow.”
As the above shows, the collection is a mix of poetic forms, including a large selection of prose poems, almost essayistic in their style and length. Most of these are in the segment detailing Kilbourne’s experiences doing research on Ellesmere Island. In addition to a variety of forms, Kilbourne also makes use of a lot of sound techniques — consonance, assonance, rhyme and near rhyme — adding a sense of musicality to much of the work. A few examples include: “tundra stubble,” “proudly posing,” “fabled remains at this glacier-scraped latitude,” “working with awk and brush, we clear always stone and dust.”
As with any collection, the poems will vary in their individual impact, but overall, in its mix of science and social critique, its variety in style and sound, Natural History is an excellent collection and an easy recommendation.