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Some Simple Things Said by and about Humans
Winner of the 2014 BOAAT Chapbook Competition, selected by Ben Mirov.
"These poems gaze at you with their square pupils, and lick your face with their prehensile tongues. Brenda’s poems see you, and if you look back at them, you’ll see yourself, only a smaller more fragile version projected onto the abyssal surface of their eyes. This books gives us the rare chance to experience our humanity in the most inhuman terms."
—Ben Mirov, author of Hider Roser (Octopus Books, 2012)
"These poems gaze at you with their square pupils, and lick your face with their prehensile tongues. Brenda’s poems see you, and if you look back at them, you’ll see yourself, only a smaller more fragile version projected onto the abyssal surface of their eyes. This books gives us the rare chance to experience our humanity in the most inhuman terms."
—Ben Mirov, author of Hider Roser (Octopus Books, 2012)
- GenresPoetry
42 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 21, 2021
… It is a neurosis, this situation of Chickens free falling out of the sky
Folks are trying to catch the Chickens in their arms as they fall so they won’t crash land on hard surfaces The people
are holding the Chickens tightly, comforting them There are no male Chickens, the industry killed them off after
hatching All the Chickens falling from the sky are in fact, female — “Chicken Little”
This is an amazing collection of poems discussing and illuminating the problems involved in animal welfare and activism. Specific messages range from major organizations leaving holes in their support of decent causes, to individual activists being discredited (even by their loved ones), to animals being meat. Polar bears being “poster children” of global warming, despite the fact that they’re more than symbols (and yet, in the messaging around the disasters that endanger polar bears, there’s “the pedagogy of teachings that Now is universal”). The mention of Laika, and how her suit wasn’t designed to be retrieved. A couple poems point out the surrealism of “souvenirs of death,” of taxidermy animals. These poems are packed with stories.
By shining a focus on these things, the motivation, complicity, cruelty of humans is drawn into question. Overall, I thought the style was abstract: There’s a poem titled “Words that Relate to the Whale,” and that is exactly what it is (for example, different governments – Norwegian, Danish, Japanese, United States). Punctuation can be optional, but this doesn’t get in the way of understanding the poems – if anything, Ijimia does it to strengthen the message. Another poem regarding Dolly the Sheep is heavily stylized with the trademark symbol, to emphasize the fact that she was studied and commercialized; that’s the focus of the poem: Her offspring’s names are tucked at the bottom, footnotes but with their trademark symbols, too. The poems were sharp and sometimes strange, but all this worked. There’s a lot of power in the messages; the matter-of-fact tone complimented the abundance of scientific and historical facts; and all this balanced with the stream-of-consciousness style.
Folks are trying to catch the Chickens in their arms as they fall so they won’t crash land on hard surfaces The people
are holding the Chickens tightly, comforting them There are no male Chickens, the industry killed them off after
hatching All the Chickens falling from the sky are in fact, female — “Chicken Little”
This is an amazing collection of poems discussing and illuminating the problems involved in animal welfare and activism. Specific messages range from major organizations leaving holes in their support of decent causes, to individual activists being discredited (even by their loved ones), to animals being meat. Polar bears being “poster children” of global warming, despite the fact that they’re more than symbols (and yet, in the messaging around the disasters that endanger polar bears, there’s “the pedagogy of teachings that Now is universal”). The mention of Laika, and how her suit wasn’t designed to be retrieved. A couple poems point out the surrealism of “souvenirs of death,” of taxidermy animals. These poems are packed with stories.
By shining a focus on these things, the motivation, complicity, cruelty of humans is drawn into question. Overall, I thought the style was abstract: There’s a poem titled “Words that Relate to the Whale,” and that is exactly what it is (for example, different governments – Norwegian, Danish, Japanese, United States). Punctuation can be optional, but this doesn’t get in the way of understanding the poems – if anything, Ijimia does it to strengthen the message. Another poem regarding Dolly the Sheep is heavily stylized with the trademark symbol, to emphasize the fact that she was studied and commercialized; that’s the focus of the poem: Her offspring’s names are tucked at the bottom, footnotes but with their trademark symbols, too. The poems were sharp and sometimes strange, but all this worked. There’s a lot of power in the messages; the matter-of-fact tone complimented the abundance of scientific and historical facts; and all this balanced with the stream-of-consciousness style.
November 1, 2017
A chapbook that discusses animals in order to shed light into the human condition. A good read.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews