Galatea

by Melanie Challenger

In Galatea, her first collection, Challenger casts a poet's sensitive eye across the hours of a tumultuous century to create startling poems whose voice - resolute, compassionate, original - both celebrates and mourns the tensions of human nature. Drawing her themes from the Pygmalion myth, Challenger portrays her subjects in trembling poise between action and inaction, consummation and defeat.

76 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Melanie Challenger works as a researcher on the history of humanity and the natural world, and environmental philosophy. She is a member of the UK's Nuffield Council on Bioethics. She received a Darwin Now Award for her research in the Canadian Arctic, and the Arts Council International Fellowship with the British Antarctic Survey for her work on the history of whaling. Her books include On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature and How to Be Animal: A new history of what it means to be human. She hosts the podcast Enter the Psychosphere: A kinds of minds podcast.