Manatee/Humanity

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A fascinating work from an internationally renowned poet

Anne Waldman’s new investigative hybrid-poem explores the nuances of inter-species communication and compassion. It draws on animal lore, animal encounters (with grey wolf and manatee), dreams, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and Buddhist ritual to render a text of remarkable sympathy, reciprocity, and power. The poem asks questions as well as urges further engagement with the endangered (including our human selves). Part performance litany, part survival kit, part worried mammalian soundings, Waldman explores, as ever, what it means to inhabit our condition through language and imagination inside a wheel of time. This is the mature work of a philosophical field poet with a shamanic metabolism.“This sprawling book-length poem from an American countercultural giant takes its form and concerns from a Tibetan Buddhist ritual and from the poet’s close encounter with the endangered aquatic mammal of her title . . . Waldman’s energetic odes and dialogues, part memory and part dream, may learn from the manatee what it is to be human; they also try to understand the nonhuman, from seaweeds and seashells to mammals . . . Exuberant . . . Waldman figures the gap between mind and body as the gap between air and sea, between the manatee’s world and our own.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“Waldman brings her wild, oracular voice to the environmental questions that currently bedevil us . . . Waldman uses both rhetorical and visual devices to demand our attention, but her work is predominantly incantatory . . . One of Waldman’s strongest books.”
—BooklistAnne Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she still teaches. Her poetry collections include Iovis I, Iovis II, Fast Speaking Woman, Helping the Dreamer, and Kill or Cure. She is a recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award.US

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