Language Animal

The second poetry collection from acclaimed poet Susannah Dickey, winner of the PEN Heaney Prize.

How do we communicate the hopefulness of new love in a dying world?

A young woman, dining alone in a Paris bistro while awaiting the arrival of her lover – confronts her dish of calf’s head with winter berries and wonders, where is the neck? Where, these poems go on to ask, is the profound disconnect that has led us to our current state, apparent custodians of a world we have destroyed and of other lives we have subjugated and extinguished.

In Language Animal, the speaker attempts to narrate her experiences of a moribund planet alongside the intoxicating and solipsistic bliss of romantic feeling. In poems that traverse three different European spaces – Paris, the Greek island of Hydra, and Prague – and confront three different instances of non-human disenfranchisement – a calf’s head on a menu, crab meat linguine, a dead horse statue – the poet scrabbles for a different way of thinking that might permit, or change, her two, seemingly paradoxical ideas: that we, as a species, are not so special, and that she, as a lover, is.

''It’s not often that you will read a book of poetry that will have you gasping in horror one minute, smiling ruefully the next.'' - Belfast Telegraph