Animals/Bodies

In Animals / Bodies the death of an opossum leads to the death of a birthing; while the birth of a boy is akin to that of a wolverine. These poems are alive with the feeling of shared skins and bodies, with common struggles, emotion and experience. Couturier draws no lines between human and nonhuman fragility or vulnerability. Inspired by Wallace Stevens, “. . . I know, too / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know” Couturier’s poems mourn and celebrate our lives with animals, all the while wondering “is this how absence asks if it has all been enough.”