Animal Like Any Other by Tara Shea Burke

Animal Like Any Other by Tara Shea Burke

(3 customer reviews)

$19.99

 

Tara Shea Burke writes with so much goddamn intensity that it feels like looking at infrared images, where not only bodies present various levels of heat, but objects like dishes, flannel, dirt, and gravel also radiate with glowing complications. Animal Like Any Other celebrates the energetic relationships between people between things between homes between multiple selves, until the between is no more and we realize we are really in it, blurred translucent in all of this heat, discovering vulnerable-rebellious ways to love again, deeply.

— Steven Dunn, Potted Meat and water & power

 

Animal Like Any Other is a collection like no other—Tara Shea Burke‘s mixed use of prose and poetry and the unnamed hybrid forms in between draw the reader into her words, her thoughts, her body. As distinct as her voice is, she is also unnervingly connective, speaking not just to us, but as us: inside our own unspoken thoughts, emotions, and bodies. This is, after all, what great poetry does. But, for those of us who grew up working-class, we will particularly find refuge in Burke’s stories, finding ourselves alternating between the release of tears and ecstatic cries of Yes! at the nuanced details of experience that she so poignantly gifts us with.

–Erica Hoffmeister, author of Lived in Bars and Roots Grew Wild

“Tara Shea Burke is the Hieronymous Bosch of working-class rural America. In one corner of the painting is a child in front of a television, shoving mashed potatoes into her mouth while her feet trace the faces of newscasters and politicians. In another corner a family throws beanbags into homemade cornhole boards in a field of discarded beer cans and unused dildos. In the center is the author’s own body, doused in kerosene and red wine on a pyre, waiting for the whiskey-soaked arrow of the lover who will set her aflame. All the while, in a forest that borders every edge of canvas, two children chase one another between the trees, ever youthful and wild in a past that runs through memory like an endless ticker tape. Animal Like Any Other is a book for lesbians with daddy issues, the children of chronic smokers and drinkers who were partially raised by television, and for anyone who has loved desperately and lost wholeheartedly. Burke has drawn a non-linear map of a life that is lovingly grotesque.”
–Isobel O’Hare, author of all this can be yours

 

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Description

Animal Like Any Other

by Tara Shea Burke

$19.99, Full-length, paper

978-1-64662-027-2

2019

Tara Shea Burke is a queer poet and teacher from the Blue Ridge Mountains and Hampton Roads, Virginia. She’s a writing instructor, editor, creative coach, and yoga teacher who has taught and lived in Virginia, New Mexico, and Colorado. She believes in community building, encouragement, and practice-based living, writing, teaching, and art.

3 reviews for Animal Like Any Other by Tara Shea Burke

  1. Kirsten Barkmeier (verified owner) –

    Tara’s work hits me right in the soul. I really enjoyed this collection.

  2. Molly A M (verified owner) –

    Tara brings her past to vivid life through her writing. I read Animal Like Any Other in one sitting, during which it felt like a rare treat to be part of her world for a little while.

  3. Alex P. (verified owner) –

    Tara writes so viscerally that I felt like I was able to see inside her soul, and reflect on my own. I truly struggled to put it down even for a minute. Everything from complicated family dynamics and alcoholism, to relationships crumbling and regrowing in new spaces, it all spoke to me on multiple levels. This will be a collection I come back to for years to come.

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