WINNER OF THE OMNIDAWN OPEN ::: WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MARY JO BANG
This book is a hybrid poem-novel based on the life of Kafka, mixed with the lives of animals and with family history (my mother and her family fled Hungary at the end of WWII while members of my father's family remained in Siberia, stranded in labor camps for decades.)
Our Animal is a metamorphosis of novel and poetic forms, tracking Kafka's life through his deep identification with animals, especially those hunted or outcast. Drawing on family history in wartime Hungary and Siberia, Our Animal, re-weaves exile and homeland, the familiar and displaced.
ABOUT OUR ANIMAL
"Our Animal haunts the tragic peripheries of World War II, and in doing so touches upon: G-d, diaspora, trauma, memory, testimony, history, and survival ...
The brilliance of this book lies in Stricker’s effortless fusion of so many genres— biography, lyric, essay, visual poetry—into a singular idiom while documenting her search for the Soul’s residence after unthinkable disaster. Her ethics is such that the beauty of the writing does not shield us from brutality, instead leading us always 'further into the dark conveyance beyond imagination.'"
– Brian Teare
“Meredith Stricker has taken bits of Kafka's writing, disembodied those bits, and wedded them (welded them) to her own pressing lyric meditations. The result is an intricate collage that feels like a machine fabric that's been taken apart, thread by thread, and then rewoven by hand... Who speaks to us, and who speaks when we speak? The answer ...is that we are who we are and who we read: one composite animal that is inevitably other."
– Mary Jo Bang, from "Our Kafka(esque) Animal", judge's essay for Our Animal
"In Our Animal we find ourselves driving at nightfall, radio on, away from Dante’s selva oscura, in the direction of Eden. The poems are the broadcast of every instance and new species passed along the way."
– Donald Revell
"Meredith Stricker’s chapter-poem is a brilliant mix of lyric, narrative, and epic elements. Sampling, scrambling, overlaying, collaging, and crossing out language from Kafka’s diaries, stories, and aphorisms and Dante’s hell and paradise, Stricker creates a set of meditations in which human, animal, vegetable, and mineral life not only co-exist but converse... rich in its resonance for our nonhuman moment."
– Adalaide Morris on Our Animal
Graphically complex with metamorphic text layers, the chapters IN OUR ANIMAL shape-shift in relation to crows, dragonflies, a frog; there are deer, swallows, a goldfinch, humans, a hybrid Beast, wolf, Insekt, a small unidentified animal in its burrow – bios writing and re-writing wartime, fragments of history and the nature of trans/lation: interlingual, interspecies.