Personhood

by Thalia Field

At the edges of history, territories, species, and theories, arbitrary lines mark us, mapping the living and the dead. Where animals overlap or get tangled in the lines, we beg the question. Where the lines fall apart, we jump to simple answers, and land in deadly consequences.

      Whether exploring refugee parrots, indentured elephants, the revolving absurdity of the human role in the “invasive species crisis,” or the pathetic fallacy, Personhood reveals that the unmistakable problem remaining between humans and our nonhuman relatives is one of language. Thalia Field’s bold and engaging new work focuses a wide lens on how power justifies itself at the extremes, where violence and story attempt to quell the complexity of a shared planet. In this brilliant study of the irrational, Personhood combines and repositions the real experience of animal lives as the poetic test for how we can move beyond our delusions of some special status. Crossing genres of poetry, essay, drama, and fiction, Field offers us an enthralling, heartbreaking look at the fragility of our natural world and the species that occupy it.

Genres: Poetry, Nature

112 pages, Paperback

First published May 4, 2021

About the author

Thalia Field was born in Chicago in 1966. After attending lycée in France, she graduated with honors from Brown University. She has three books of experimental writing/prose poetry published with New Directions: Point and Line (2000), Incarnate: Story Material (2004), and Bird Lovers, Backyard (2009). A novel, ULULU (Clown Shrapnel) was published by Coffee House Press in 2008. Field's writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Chicago Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Theater, Central Park, Chain, and Conjunctions, where she served as editor from 1995-1999. Before joining the faculty at Brown University, where she currently teaches experimental fiction and performance, Field taught at Bard College and at the Writing and Poetics program at Naropa University.

Reviews

[B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been waiting a long time for a vegan book to be written as literature with a capital L. Field writes these wonderful creative avant-garde essays, which in some sections turn into poetry. The first three sections were excellent—brilliant even—but sadly it became a bit uneven and hit or miss after that. Field is at her best when she balances substance and style, but some of the pieces grew tedious when she opted for style over substance, and subsequently some of the meaning was lost in the process.

That being said, it's a short book, and the few I loved are worth it just for those pieces. At any rate, I'll be keeping an eye on Field's future work. They're definitely an author to look out for.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to describe this work, mainly because it doesn't follow The Rules. The Rules say: Begin, then proceed to the Middle, then gather ye your loose ends in a tidy know and End. The other Rule is that you must provide exquisite, intimate, stirring details that shape or form your Human characters. Emphasis on Human. But not here.

This collection of wossnames (essays that stray into poetry that run off the page and back on again, that wander into transcriptions of conversation, that turn around to punch with the truth of scientific fact) is about People. Not humans. I think the underlying gnome of this collection could be formulated like this: Not all humans are People but then, not all People are humans. I think too of Jane Allison's recent book that demonstrates that pretty much everything we know about writing (as codified by MFA programs and such) is wrong. We don't write Freytag's Pyramid, we meander, we spiral, and we explode. Fields collects facts and intuits inner states in what, to me, is an effort to establish the veracity--which so many of us already feel intuitively is a profound truth--that theory of mind is not limited to humans. I see that crow--and I know that crow sees me looking at it, I know that crow is cawing to warn other crows that a human and a dog are in the vicinity, and we are all minds considering our relationships with one another. Dog and crow, predator and prey; human and crow, speculating about each other's intentions. Well. So much for the philosophical foundation in this book: it's about being Animal in a world human, all too human.

Fields' writing is wonderful! The opening piece on parrot enslavement evokes serious considerations of other settler-colonialist efforts by humans (Franz Fanon in the rainforest). Why do we always assume that we are the axis of existence and that all other life revolves round us? Parrots have their own axis: a need to mate for life, perhaps most important when in a relationship with a human. But humans rarely understand the parrot's point of view (or the animal's back story: stolen as a hatchling from its nest, traumatized by dark cages and long journeys to pet stores where gawking humans poke and prod): we are not "pets," though we are capable of love: Fields wants us to hear the voice of the parrot through the writing of the human. It's a difficult task she attempts, but I think she succeeds wonderfully. At least, that's the impression I am left with after counting the tears I spilled reading this opening piece.

And then there's the elephants, another long-lived species that humans have murdered for ivory and enslaved for their copious strength. Capitalism *always* exploits the labor of others. Our karmic damnation, though, damns all the world's peoples, not just the miserable, traumatized humans.

Throughout (but especially in the parrot piece), and as if she were a legal scholar, Fields layers in arguments for the personhood of non-human beings. More and more, groups of humans are acting to establish and enforce the rights of animals and landscapes. These rivers, lakes, prairies, trees, all these webs of beings, are cognitive entities that we never did have the right to exploit to the extent we do.

I am alarmed that the reviews here are not exactly glowing, are even dismissive without a second thought for what is being attempted here. Look, it ain't easy, this book, but if you want to be a true person (rather than a mere human), we have to step up, do the difficult work, make hard choices, turn down the flame. We have to give ourselves time and space to read deeply, to imagine the minds of others, to not limit ourselves to our selfish conceptions of what it means to be human. Being human is nothing without Personhood. So, try this book, I urge you and, to paraphrase Laurie Anderson, "Welcome to difficult reading hour."

[Malory · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting read. Some chapters like "Hi Adam!", "Happy/That You Have The Body" and "The Health of My Stream Or The (Most) Pathetic Fallacy" almost brought me to tears. This definitely makes you question everything you know about animals and owning pets, about the relationship you think you have with them, the way we only really see animals for what we want them to be, for what it'll say about us. Animals, when studied, are always put in contrast with and compared to humans and observed through the prism of what humans are capable: this book questions whether always using this specific human lens when looking at animals might be supporting an arbitrary hierarchy, might be fueling a perpetually skewed analysis of nature instead of simply looking at it for what it is, without the need to rank species.
Thalia Field also plays with literary devices throughout the book and challenges usual ways of writing, which I did appreciate even though it's not usually what I enjoy reading.

[Evelyn · Rating 1 out of 5]

A mishmash of incoherent dribble, utter nonsense, quotations and contradictions. The book consists of essays and a combination of poetry and prose, much of which makes less sense than the writings of an elementary school student and are slapdash in nature.

The book rates one star for the cover art on the paperback edition that I read ... it is the weeping parrot cover art that appears on Goodreads Kindle edition cover.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

What draws me to Thalia Field's work is the self-awareness, the writer self aware that she is both a self in the world and a self recording that world around her, and, without needing to say it explicitly, there is an imperfect movement when a self is "recording." But, thankfully, Field will say it. Because it is how she establishes that imperfect recording that is the site of constant invention in her work. It comes with, say, "The Health of My Stream or the (Most) Pathetic Fallacy." Where she records this desire to sentimentally preserve the little cove where she watches fish only to recognize that this action is an unnatural act that could be affecting the fish's lives. Or it's in "Irrational/Situation" where she analyzes the seeming geometric paradox around the perfect square. A square with units measuring 1 will, by Pythagorean Theorem, have an irrational diagonal. So these two very rational geometries lead to an irrationality. And what's the statement on that? And how does that relate back to the whole fact of personhood?

For me, this is the absolute magic of Field's writing. A magic that reprises the {selection} device that she had used in her first book Point and Line. I don't think I've seen this device used in other books (I could be wrong). But it was well placed in this book. Very exciting!

[An · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book often adopts a theatrical tone and exudes an elegiac atmosphere throughout. Its strongest chapters, "Hi Adam!" and "happy/that you have the body," excel in discussing the concept of habeas corpus in relation to nonhuman lives. The author's incorporation of contemporary life events is something I particularly appreciated. However, as chapters like "Patients" and "Irrational/situation" began to focus more on style than substance (or perhaps I struggled to grasp how Pythagoras's philosophy related to the central theme), my attention waned considerably. The book itself is styled as poetry cum essay, a format I've never encountered before, making for a truly novel experience. Special thanks to New Directions and Thalia Field for making the audiobook publicly available. Poetry sounds much better in audiobook format, and this was no exception. Source: https://twitter.com/NewDirections/sta...

[Lia Cooper]

read this for a literature class. i'll refrain from giving it a rating because fundamentally the style is just not my cup of tea. "Happy/That You Have the Body" was one of the more interesting sections but it's also one of the more traditionally nonfiction sections. "Turns Before the Curtain" was also quite interesting discussing intersections between animal extinction, globalization, and environmental impact. But after that the rest of the book was a miss for me sadly

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whoa - very unique book! This book is about animal / human relationships and the rights of animals Made me think. Made me emotional. Field uses information from real life court cases, statistics, and Greek mythology alongside repetition and unusual writing techniques ie a section demarcated as being a “monologue from inside a tree costume”. The form is experimental with some stories giving mad libs, and all of them disjointed, but pretty effective.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/4 stars

[Cat Argabright · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an incredible commentary on climate change, animal rights, genesis and the impact of Christianity on climate change... Just all around a beautiful piece of surrealism

[Sarkis Antonyan · Rating 2 out of 5]

it’s about how it’s executed. i’m moving on🧎🏻

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Such necessary things to say about animal abuse. intelligence. I felt that the stories were lost under the technique.

[Ella Louise Schalski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for class.

I wasn’t personally the biggest fan. It’s very experimental, and I’m not into experimental literature that much. Also, a white woman writing about Buddhism…hm…