Animal Husbandry by Susan Lewis

I am grateful for the generous beauty of this collection. Language informs the remarkable poems it contains as much as the sensuous truths that attend the memory of experience. Because of this, and the lyrical skill that gracefully unites them, they are possessed of a startling and passionate clarity.

—CHUCK WACHTEL

Animal Husbandry is an accomplished set of playful and bracing poems. The   temperature rises with feverish melodic articulations of ironies and transpositions. Emoticons express passion with rare pleasure, folded into the practice of breeding, this time with lines of verse.“Dots dance on paper,/molecules bump, so listen” to these coy, funny and haunting poems.

—NORMA COLE

Animal Husbandry is a playful and rigorous rediscovery of poetry’s ability to make linguistic conceptual abstraction into sensory experience, and vice versa. It invites readers to share not only the intellection but also the affective energies of its sung queries about how the “all this too much we know now” suffuses our erotic, political, and parental lives. These poems orchestrate tone, melody, rhythm, and syntax to bring across the urgency of their nuanced questioning about matters stretching from our origin as a species to all too recent political catastrophes. With their gift for formal and stylistic compression, for condensation laced with startling shifts of speed and sound, these poems transform the necessary limitations of the coin of the realm into the making of virtuoso turns on a dime.

—ROBERT KAUFMAN