Primate Behavior
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A National Book Award Finalist—a bestiary in verse from the acclaimed poet whose “molten imagination burns new channels for poetry” (Kay Ryan, author of Erratic Facts).
Once in a generation a poet arrives with such an unexpected and compelling vision that readers take notice right from the start. With Primate Behavior, Sarah Lindsay made just such a debut with her exuberant, witty, and outrageous poems.
Primate Behavior is the product of a wild imagination ranging wide across an abundant imaginary landscape. Sarah Lindsay writes of space migration and the cave paintings of 35,000 B.C; she speaks from the perspective of an embalmed mummy and details the adventures of nineteenth century explorers.
In this “must read” volume full of “eerie, spectral beauty,” Lindsay investigates the world as no one else could, reanimating history and folk legend and setting in motion curious new worlds that speak eccentrically, but unmistakably, to our own (Fred Chappell, author of As if it Were).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Had Dr. Dolittle fathered a prodigious daughter, she might well be behind the bizarre and entertaining personae found on the pages of Lindsay's first-book bestiary. For example, consider the odd precocity of the narrator in "Manatee in Honey": "I thought I might die of foolishness at last/ being fed every time I opened my mouth, my lashes/ held beautifully shut by pure molasses,// and a smile on all my lips that wouldn't go." Or the two sets of Siamese twins, one entranced by the sight of a giraffe--"Chang thinks, If everyone looked that strange/ we'd still be selling duck eggs. Eng:/ If everyone looked like that but us,/ they'd pay to see our short necks"--while the other pair join the circus and become pregnant. Lindsay's voice is impersonal and intelligent, fantastical and yet firmly grounded in world history, zoology and--since she is also a cellist--classical music. Focused on freakiness, most directly in the section Circus Merk, Lindsay's dark-edged, sometimes creepy poems are also imbued with a buoying sense of respect--for the different, the unexpected and the challenging. The evolutionary unlikelihoods presented in such poems as "Cheese Penguin" and "Toby the Sapient Pig" provoke a far deeper response than surprise.
