The Knowing Animals

Emily Skov-Nielsen

• Publisher: Brick Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781771315340
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Poems that sing, in various notes of female voice, the human being as an embodied, contemplative, feeling animal.

In Skov-Nielsen's thrumming debut, The Knowing Animals, our consciousness is interconnected with the surrounding trees, bugs, rivers, atmospheres, and cosmos. Here, flowers escape Victorian domestication and ally with girls' green powers of attraction. Here, the social politeness of motherly domesticity and the raw dangers of adolescent sexual awakening are shot through with blood pulsing under the skin, with oxygen exchanged in gasps of breath. Here, everything tender and petalling is also raw and mothervisceral.

This is a book of entanglements: the poems twist and turn through a plurality of metaphorical associations involving botany, zoology, astronomy, biology, psychology, and mythology to complicate and expand human conceptions of nature. At the same time, they explore themes such as motherhood, pregnancy and birth, sexuality, adolescence, and the rise of technology, all the while shifting through a variety of tones: romantic, mythological, religious, scientific, wistful, and playful.

Superbloom

Menstromania

Loose and bloody in the bathwater, a crossbred

sea star/sponge/jellyfish of mucosal tissue,

a strand of uterus, a small stringed instrument,

a nest, a tuft of down feather fallen from a bird

in the hand of my body (a hedge sparrow)—

or maybe it’s a knot of spider silk. It is time

spelled out—f-o-u-r weeks to be exact—a shredded page

from a calendar eaten by the moon whose teeth

shine as it bites through my lower abdomen, a pain

lit from the inside like a paper lantern. Yes,

this is what my body has become overnight,

a ranting lunatic of clarity and impulse, dysphoria

and cravings—a bloated hull, red sky at morning,

an eyelid turned inside out, a dauntless sea-craft

crossing waters in an equatorial countercurrent

spurred by monsoon winds, wind spiking

the ocean’s surface like a dragon fruit. My body

is the red rind of a tart, hidden pomegranate,

the air is appetite, tonguing the pulpy seeds

(of what?) inside me, inciting a slow evisceration,

catabolization, breakdown in the bloodstream,

the hemodynamics of the world, its nonstop

pulse searching for the aortic semi-lunar valve

in the arterial tree, a big-tooth aspen perhaps,

yes, that’s the one. Don’t call me hysteric, call me

wisteric, bearing racemes of blue-lilac papilionaceous

flowers and wrist-thick trunks, collapsing latticework.

I’m a head case with an acute associative disorder

tending a garden of hypochondria with offshoots

of violet amnesias, long convoluted tendrils climbing

a trellis of intersecting stakes. I’m a recovering psycho-

somatic somnambulating between the body and the mind,

rebuilding the distance with words until relapsing

into this poem, this unmoored monastery of endometrial

cells adrift, this intertidal ragbag tatter of home, no longer

a home but a memory—far and near, loose and bloody.

Visitation

Roving through flowering megacities,

fields of sea lavender—carrying a zygote

nearly invisible inside me, while savouring

the soft pornography of this Disneynature

landscape, waiting for Meryl Streep’s voice

to come gliding in, luciferous as always,

draping sublimity, narrating every kill.

I haunt the deer who have come to feed

at the edge of the coastal wood. I fall in with

the flow of animals closing and opening mirrored

doors with a feeling that I’m being followed:

a complicated faith, utopian and disquieting.

Waking

For Ava

1.

Night wanes.

The arrow-pointed attention of the nocturnals—

their small, violent eyes fixed

on a lengthening red distance. The hunted

shed their vulnerability with each eastward step;

the sun smoothing its hand along their slackening backs,

the same hand that unswathes the house

from its dark swaddle. Sleep—

the rounded edges of a folded cloth, tucked away,

once more, in a pine-scented cupboard,

still cool but warming.

2.

I wake to the ripple of a full womb,

to an early memory of my mother’s veined wrists

plunging int...

Table of contents

• Copyright
• Dedication
• Superbloom
• Rewilding
• Her Sharps
• Dream-Damp
• Homespun
• The Vanishing Point
• Considering Physics, Destiny’s Child, BDSM, and Simone Weil at Drag Bingo
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author