They Gather Around Me, the Animals

Selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the 2024 Barbara Stevens Poetry Book Award

National Federation of State Poetry Societies

The brilliance of Kunjana Parashar's They Gather Around Me, the Animals gleams through the lens of the majesty of the animals that were here, are here, and may well be disappearing, in poems jubilant and elegiac at once. Parashar's approach to language and form evolves through the course of the book, from the devotional to the surreal, from contrapuntal to pantoum, concrete poems to erasures, poems written in both the presence and the absence of the animals that are their subjects, and written in a diction which opens the lexicon to the language of the ecological imagination. "i see pictures of blue-green hexacorals / patching a floor of zoanthids like a zardozi dream / & i say listen, i love you too," she writes. Parashar's speaker is "never not listening," and never not watching, and she listens to and watches the actual world, not the world as sifted through a screen. Thus, she knows that "[w]hales slap on the coast like fingers on guitars." That "[n]ow that the birds are gone, we hang our cuckoo clocks upside down." That rain falls "like a bag of teeth on tin roofs." That in the absence of birds, "[w]e break our binoculars in grief." That in the absence of howls, in a poem without dogs, "we lost our vowel sounds." How the lyric itself, the music of our consonants and vowels, is contingent upon the voices of animals.

-Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry

As a creature of the senses, Kunjana Parashar shares a passionate commonality with the animal world. She writes gorgeous praise songs and prose poems and elegies, all shaped with the precise diction of place and habitat. A scientifically savvy poet, she finds cause for celebration even in a toxic marsh, cause for remembrance in the lost. She writes, "...love does not need a gaunt theorem/ to explain it. love loves." And this poet's love of the creaturely world is cause for celebration.

-Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower and editor of The Gift of Animals: Poems of Love, Loss & Connection