Animal Afterlife by Jaya Stenquist

You are a binturong, feeling the wind lift your whiskers, smooth over your buttery self. Your briefest relationships are when an arctic fox meets a summer fox. Your grief is a silent lion, following you around.

I read this collection shortly after the sudden death of one of my best friends. I picked it up, even though I didn’t feel any spark for art. I started reading in the bath. Then I was on the bathroom floor, water cold, a little shocked to return to myself in human form, holding a book.

Stenquist’s poems are so alive and intimate, I felt like I became each creature she explores. Each scene. In “Speak/Sea”:

In the end, your body always finds the surface line.
Water/body/sky. Everything tinging blue.
Red saltwater and air make a body—just a sea
with a firmer edge
inside all storm & wave.

That landed deep in me. On a macro level, Animal Afterlife covers species loss, violence, and consumption. The way it plays out, however, is highly specific. The pretend mouth on the wings of a moth is like the silence predators want from their women, a pe’epe’emaka’ole wolf spider knows the only real beauty is the fit of its children’s teeth notched / in the hairs on my back.

As Animal Afterlife explains, in the Hindu reincarnation cycle the animal afterlife is people—us. These poems mimic what they describe, persona poems that blur back and forth between a human narration and creature-ness. Stenquist embodies animals as part of who we are.

Some of my favorite poems of the collection came in the ocean animals—their world so set apart from ours. “orcas of the salish sea” say, how hard it must be / to imagine our bodies entirely sufficient / how we were born into the salty world while our mothers stilled their fins.

As a “phoenix petrel,” we watch bodies die for smaller bodies’ consummation/consumption/degradation? / you have so much anger at the power the world has over you.

Aren’t all poems supposed to be about desire? I feel none of it. I lock eyes with a person and all I feel is startled.

In a book full of hunger and hunting, eating and starving, the human-centric poems seemed hungriest of all. “how to cook during the pandemic” and two poems titled “Thousand Year Old Woman” balance over canyons of anorexia, spending time in the psych ward—and the long history of women spending time in psych wards.

Extinction also hovers in the background of these poems, the changing-climate fear I couldn’t help but bring to each species, including ours. But Animal Afterlife doesn’t stand on a stage and proclaim the doom of the world. The textured intimacy of each line is like touching a furry, slippery or snuffing thing and loving it, wanting to pull it to safety, grieving it with attention.

This way to grieve helped me. Instead of seeing our earth as the locality of loss, this collection filled my imagination with smells, sounds, and vibrations through the night air. The poems are so palpable, I felt like I’d meditated when I read them: no one knows how impossibly gentle / I am in the night my white hairs raised / soft in the slow Madagascar wind (“aye-aye”).

Stenquist’s language is just crackling. She does so much soundwork that I routinely got full-body chills before the significance of a line had fully landed. Spacing, line length, and shape vary greatly throughout the book in ways that help you speed up, slow down, fall into a scene, or float off as the poem needs.

This collection helped me move away from my intellectualized and myopic awareness of grief into feeling connected, wanting to reach out, share our griefs. In “Snakes & Lions”:

Aren’t all poems supposed to be about desire? I feel none of it. I lock eyes with a person and all I feel is startled. Like looking into the center of this fjord, in the miles below the surface waters, what would swallow me whole? In someone else’s stomach, are you still alone?

If you read this book, I bet you will feel like I did—less alone. When Stenquist weaves between the animal-centric and human-centric titles, they aren’t so easy to categorize after all. And she treats people with the same open-eyed attention she gives other species. We’ve all blurred together. This is such a gift to remember.

Wouldn’t you enjoy that sense of all our lives entwined? Each creature, each us—a warm flicker. Please read this. Let Stenquist root you into the finned and purring world.

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Brianna Flavin is a poet from Saint Paul, MN. She’s a Loft Mentor Series fellow, a Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop volunteer, and a Ramsey County Master Gardener.