Kingdom Animalia

By Aracelis Girmay

The poems in this highly anticipated second book are elegiac poems, as concerned with honoring our dead as they are with praising the living. Through Aracelis Girmay's lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set of teeth, and language. These are poems about what is both difficult and beautiful about our time here on earth.

Aracelis Girmay's debut collection won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is on the faculty at Drew University and Hampshire College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Sep 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781934414682

Aracelis Girmay

Aracelis Girmay is the author of three collections of poetry: the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016); Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the 2011 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and the GLCA New Writers Award, and a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007). The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Civitella Ranieri, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Girmay is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry. She teaches in Hampshire College’s School for Interdisciplinary Arts and Drew University’s low-residency MFA program in poetry.

Book preview

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

i. a book of dirt

Kingdom Animalia

Elegy

Abuelo, Mi Muerto

Dear Minnie, Dear Ms.

Small Letter

Zewdit

Starlight Multiplication

Night

On Living

ii. a book of beautiful monsters

Swan, As the Light Was Changing

For Patrick Rosal Who Wore a Dress & Said,

March, March

Noche de Lluvia, San Salvador

La Boda del Mar y Arena

A Blooming Tree

St. Elizabeth

&

Ode to the Little r

Running Home, I Saw the Planets

iii. a book of graves & birds

Science

The Dream

Self-Portrait as the Snail

Elegy for the Stone

Portrait of the Woman as a Skein

Three Girls, One of Them a Coward Girl

Self-Portrait as the Snake

Self-Portrait as the Airplane (Ode to the Noise in the Ear)

Central City Senior Center, New Orleans

Self-Portrait as the Pirate’s Gold

Self-Portrait as the Snake’s Skin

To the Husband

This Morning the Small Bird Brought a Message from the Other Side

iv. a book of erased cities

Elegy in Gold

They Tell Me You Are Gone

The Doorway of Our Mother’s Leg Leads Me to You, Brother

Mrs. S

Night, for Henry Dumas

Break

English Class

Mississippi Burial, On the Ferry to Algiers

Explaining the Land Mine to the Small Child

To Waste My Hands

Praise Song for the Donkey

I Am Not Ready to Die Yet

& When We Woke

On Kindness

v. a fable

On the Shape of the Sentence

vi. the book of one small thing

Ars Poetica

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

BOA Editions, Ltd. American Poets Continuum Series

Colophon

Copyright Page

for Ade Zuphan

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

—Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

The framework of bones being the same in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, fin of the porpoise, and leg of the horse,—the same number of vertebrae forming the neck of the giraf fe and of the elephant,—and innumerable other such facts, at once explain themselves on the theory of descent…

—Charles Darwin, Origin of Species

i. a book of dirt

Kingdom Animalia

When I get the call about my brother,

I’m on a stopped train leaving town

& the news packs into me—freight—

though it’s him on the other end

now, saying finefine—

Forfeit my eyes, I want to turn away

from the hair on the floor of his house

& how it got there Monday,

but my one heart falls

like a sad, fat persimmon

dropped by the hand of the Turczyn’s old tree.

I want to sleep. I do not want to sleep. See,

one day, not today, not now, we will be gone

from this earth where we know the gladiolas.

My brother, this noise,

some love [you] I loved

with all my brain, & breath,

will be gone; I’ve been told, today, to consider this

as I ride the long tracks out & dream so good

I see a plant in the window of the house

my brother shares with his love, their shoes. & there

he is, asleep in bed

with this same woman whose long skin

covers all of her bones, in a city called Oakland,

& their dreams hang above them

a little like a chandelier, & their teeth

flash in the night, oh, body.

Oh, body, be held now by whom you love.

Whole years will be spent, underneath these impossible stars,

when dirt’s the only animal who will sleep with you

& touch you with

its mouth.

Elegy

What to do with this knowledge

that our living is not guaranteed?

Perhaps one day you touch the young branch

of something beautiful. & it grows & grows

despite your birthdays & the death certificate,

& it one day shades the heads of something beautiful

or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out

of your house, then, believing in this.

Nothing else matters.

All above us is the touching

of strangers & parrots,

some of them human,

some of them not

Reviews for Kingdom Animalia

[animis-411165 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the few poets that took me by storm, made me believe in the force of poetry again