Bad Animal
(By Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer)
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| Author | Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer |
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Oh, Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer's Bad Animal is a marvelously macabre and bewitching book! Here is a poet who plunges headlong into haunting intersections of faith, nature, sex, and violence, evoking for us the allures and the horrors of death, enlivening the body and stirring up questions about the future. Conjuring a world where Danger sometimes wears the face of Pleasure, and vice versa, these poems unfold a menagerie of incisive, visceral images you won't soon forget. Bratt-Pfotenhauer's language glows and pulses like an ember in the dark.
~ Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat
Bad Animal is fierce, smart, knows language as a kind of mating dance with the reader, a lever into the interior, and a demon possession. It’s aware of its body as text and texture, a source of hurt and a source of rapture. It has a hawk heart and a crow mind. Bad Animal is memorable for its avidity, its “renegade” desire, it’s scholarship of “little violences”. It puts you under a spell. It gallops inside you.
~ Bruce Smith, author of Devotions
It’s a miracle for a poetry collection to wind up so smart and so moving at once. I read Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer’s Bad Animal in one gulp, then reopened it and started over, for it rewards study. Brave new offering to the literary world, and the first of many books I’ll buy from this astonishing young poet. Buy this book!
~ Mary Karr, author of Tropic of Squalor and The Liar’s Club
Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer’s Bad Animal subtly questions the contours of comfort throughout the inevitable cycles of life—beginnings, endings, death, pain, love. When faced with the irrepressible crush of death, we find grace and tenderness skillfully linger in the moments before and after the final sleep. In this, Bratt-Pfotenhauer reminds of the importance of care in the face of nature’s brutal and sure onslaught. This book is at once a soothing lyrical balm with the sonic authority of a bomb. Read it and experience the power of a deftly written and precisely conceived work of art.
~ Airea D. Matthews, author of Simulacra & Bread and Circus”
