Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
A powerful and breathtaking poetic justice taxonomy for those left alive after impact
In this debut collection that moves through the tangled aftermath of sexual violence, Cassandra Myers rejects the familiar grammar of predator and prey, wolf and sheep, deer and shotgun. Instead, these poems gather around creatures that fit into the sticky-sick liminal spaces of survival. By turns feral, tender, and incandescent, Myers's poems braid personal narrative with ecological observation, survivor testimony with metamorphosis, cultural refusal with the strange intelligence of the natural world. Here, healing is neither linear nor pure. It molts. It scavenges. It mimics death.
Birthing the upside-down cross of the defence cascade, these poems move through revenge fantasies, frozen winters of self-blame, unexpected kinships, and the slow return of tenderness. Refusing bone-clean survivor carceralities, Survivor Animalia asks what becomes possible when we look to more-than-human life as a luminous companion for anyone learning how to live after the unthinkable.
"Survivor Animalia is a book of immense brilliance and bravery, not just in language and content but in shape, in form, in the adventurous nature of the metaphor and the image and how the poems leap to life on the page. This is a stunning debut from a singular poetic voice."
—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us and A Little Devil in America
Cassandra Myers (they/she) is a National Magazine Award–winning poet, the inaugural recipient of the Lillian Allen Prize for spoken word poetry, and a Canadian Festival of Spoken Word Champion. Their work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Canadian Literature, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, Grain, and Arc Poetry Magazine. Selected as a Writers' Trust of Canada Rising Star and mentored by Amber Dawn, they are also a winner of the Toronto Arts and Letters Club Poetry Award and The Malahat Review Open Season Award. Myers holds a Master of Social Work from York University and lives in Richmond Hill, ON.