Zoodikers: A Bestiary

To understand anything-or to attempt to-is to discover how distinctions and similarities conflux, flip, muddle, resist, meld, blur, and reflect. Boundaries are plastic if not arbitrary, the world and its inhabitants are fragile, everything is interconnected and Zoodikers: A Bestiary is Flower Conroy's endeavor to write through and towards this. Part personal inventory, part existential dread meditation, part hope anthem, this collection of prose poems ferociously explores the realities bedeviling its speakers: aging, the body, sickness, extinction, sex and sexuality, queerness, life, birth, childlessness, death, the future, the past, AI, what is human as well as what is animal. Juxtaposing syntax and musicality, language play and gallows humor, acute observations and philosophic wonderings, myth, superstition, and fact, Conroy invokes and evokes questions of what it means to be human or animal or other. Feral, perturbed, zany, scrutinizing, these poems shapeshift; appearances aren't necessarily fixed and animation is questionable-from what is life, what is death, what's in between, to how to determine degrees of consciousness: isn't a chemical process a type of cognition? What is the nature of being in a coma? What's this centipede thinking? The poems are microcosms unto themselves and yet interwoven through subtext, concern, and voracity of information and imagination. Lucidity slips into hallucinatory and vice versa as Conroy navigates what it means to be alive in this weird and wild shared existence.