How to Live with Mammals

by Ash Davida Jane

we love an underdog especially when it’s a whale

we see ourselves in them literally in them lounging

in their cathedral of a mouth just looking for love

All around us, life is both teeming and vanishing. How do we live in this place of so many others and so many last things? How to Live With Mammals is not a book of instruction but a book of reimagining and a book of longing. In these funny and often poignant poems, Ash Davida Jane asks how we might reorient ourselves, and our ways of loving one another, as the futures that we once imagined grow ever more precarious.

'Urgent, funny and tender: these poems shine.' —Louise Wallace

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2021

Reviews

[Ashley Lamont · Rating 5 out of 5]

Has inspired me to start writing again.

[Shanti · Rating 4 out of 5]

utterly astonishing poetry, this book made some bad days really good. makes me want to plant things! dance a bit! stay very in love with people and the world! go to better parties! have long and unexpected conversations! spend more time kissing and being kissed! love love love Jane's work.
I finished it, lent it to my flatmate then immediatly wanted it back because I'm jealous like that.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little less animal-oriented than I anticipated, assuming humans are not counted as animals. A bold assumption, that, but with a whale in the blurb and a seal on the cover my expectation was primed for a very specific exploration of loss. And that exploration is certainly there, and I think it's fair to say that the poems I liked best here were the ones that looked closely at nonhuman animals that were either struggling or extinct or on the verge of either, and how we interact with them. My favourites were "love poems when all the flowers are dead," about grief for dinosaurs; "52 hertz whale," about that poor lonely whale who can sing to none of its kin and have them comprehend it; and "marine snow," about the experience of ecological grief. Poems about the brief seasons of asparagus, while sympathetic, do not quite compare. But then that's the question, isn't it, and it's a question of scale: should loss deserve eulogy only when it is gigantic, on a species or ecosystem scale? Or do the small experiences of absence reverberate into a parade of personalised (depersonalised) isolations that mirror those enormous losses? Are we practicing for extinction? That is, I think, what Jane is asking... but even believing this, I still find the poems of the larger losses more affecting.

[Amanda Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry book. A quick and easy read, thought provoking with humour and imagery. Def worth a read.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good.