our own beautiful brutality by Karen Poppy

In poems both brutal and beautiful, Karen Poppy traces the interconnectedness—symbiotic, antagonistic, and metaphorical—of the endangered antelope and human worlds. All the grace and violence of both worlds is here in poems that are moving, necessary, and ultimately life-affirming. I could not put down this powerful book.

–Steve Bellin-Oka, author of Instructions for Seeing a Ghost

Poppy is a poet of the 21st Century. Her pen is compelling, pointing out the crucial need for human, animal, and environmental rights and respect. Her poems inspire transformation.

–Lynne Cox, American long-distance open-water swimmer, New York Times best-selling author, and speaker

This glowing collection of Karen Poppy‘s verses reads at once as spare and abundant, elegant and generous. Her lines stretch and shrink, experimenting with a wide range of forms, and her best rhymes read like plot twists. our own beautiful brutality asks what all readers and writers ask each other across the resonance of words: “how in sudden shift did I become you?”

–Betsy Cornwell, New York Times best-selling author and founder of The Old Knitting Factory: making space for single moms to make art in a 1906 knitting school in Connemara