Description
Book SynopsisA National Poetry Series winner, selected and with a foreword by Kwame Dawes.A 5-part series of interwoven poems from a dying parent to her daughter, examining the human capacity for grief, culpability, and love, asking: do we as a species deserve to survive?Dear Specimen opens with both its speaker and her planet in peril. In “Speak to Me,” she puzzles over a millipede, as if the blue rune of its body could help her understand her impending death and the crisis her species has created. Throughout the collection, poems addressed to specimens echo the speaker’s concern and amplify her wonderment. A catalog of our climate transgressions,
Dear Specimen’s final poem foretells a future in which climate refugees overrun one of our planet’s last habitable places.
The collection’s lifeblood is a series of poems in which the speaker and her daughter express their concern for, and devotion to, one another. The
