Rabbit Lesson

by Brenda Iijima

22 pages

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Geoffrey Olsen]

The text is a surround, is evoking events, fragments, language pervasively around. It is not mitigated through a selfhood, not through an individual emotional response but an emotion divesting itself of the personal into the multiplicity in the poem. Removing the fence work between the human and the animal. (CAConrad’s “pig says to Frank/ this fence keeps you in your world/ Frank says to pig/ this fence keeps you in your world/ pig says to Frank/ this fence keeps you in your world”). Writing that is becoming animal. It is a rearrangement of the human poem not looking for the roots but becoming roots, permeating a soil of perception. This work accepts no separation between beings. The work is elegiac, giving body to the death and pain inflicted on animals, humans, women, ecosystems. Separation between these entities fails. “war can’t be separated from where where can’t be separated from what/ what can’t be separated from all…”