folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
&
in the time of screens there was also a
time of compiling.
&
the lord looked upon us, saying
“even
high-elevation forest bird habitat
(above 1,500 meters
(4,291 feet
will
remain relatively mosquito-free only until the middle of this century”
&
we replied by rending our mist netting. & in the time of screens there was
also a time of relative if difficult transparency
&
the lord looked upon us, saying
“https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/species/1119”
&
we replied yes
we have sorted them two by two. We have kept
elaborate records of our deformations,
of
the branches
to which we add
and from which
we subtract
These pieces are part of a collection of poems entitled Animals I Never Saw, which will be published this year by Flume Press. I'm wildly grateful to Rae Gouirand for selecting it for the Flume Press Chapbook Prize. Animals I Never Saw is part of the Delisted 2023 project, a collective artistic endeavour that focuses on the members of the 34 species of plants and nonhuman animals that were most recently proposed for removal from the U.S. Endangered Species List due to extinction. The species I have been working with, and which this chapbook tries to honour, is the Kauai'i 'akioloa, a large honeycreeper native to Hawai'i that was the last member of its entire genus.
.jpg)
Kimberly Quiogue Andrews [photo credit: Curtis Perry] is an American poet and literary critic. She is the author of A Brief History of Fruit, winner of the Akron Prize for Poetry from the University of Akron Press, BETWEEN, winner of the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Prize from Finishing Line Press, and The Academic Avant-Garde, a scholarly monograph from Johns Hopkins University Press. She teaches creative writing and American literature at the University of Ottawa, and you can find her on the web at www.kqandrews.com.