In Forgive the Animal, Sarah Pape’s disarmingly beautiful new collection of poetry, we humans, and our collected experiences are allowed a fresh rebirth from the crotches of bewilderingly conjoined entities: fish scales and pigs’ feet; a bag of citrus and the tantrums of gravity; death and a tattooed rabbit; a father’s bygone hopscotch square glimpsed through the brine of amber and filth, memory and machine. What exhilarating suspensions Pape fashions! What unlikely ornaments are drowned in them, before being resurrected, a little kinked for the journey, sure, but brighter than before. Pape’s poems testify to the kind of light that—if we dare to be loyal to that which it illuminates—can stretch itself into a strange halo—sometimes fragile, sometimes badass, ever the thing through which incantation can finally pass. What an earth-shattering and awesome book.”
--MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers
"'One way to lose everything /is to tell the truth’ writes Sarah Pape, and yet, every single piece in her stunning hybrid collection is an act of reclamation born of hard truth-telling. In the way the cubist painters were compelled to break apart a subject in order to observe its component parts anew, Forgive the Animal alters the known shapes of rage and love, deprivation and abundance, grief and joy. With ferocious compassion for all that is overlooked and undervalued, Pape sings us toward an authentic vision of recovery.”
--LIA PURPURA, author of It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful
An origin story as painful as it is exquisite, Forgive the Animal manifests a self who has reckoned with the calamities of the past and arrived at a place of poised, tough lyricism. In poems that are candid about the brutalities of class, addiction, and desire, Sarah Pape brings together the “wild net” of memory and the “knit stitch” of craft to show what it means to go from wreckage to illumination, despair to sweetness. This beautiful book is ultimately about the idea of home—the home of the body, the home of family, the home of a place—and how home must be incessantly fought-for, earned, and saved.”
--RICK BAROT, author of Moving the Bones
--MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers
"'One way to lose everything /is to tell the truth’ writes Sarah Pape, and yet, every single piece in her stunning hybrid collection is an act of reclamation born of hard truth-telling. In the way the cubist painters were compelled to break apart a subject in order to observe its component parts anew, Forgive the Animal alters the known shapes of rage and love, deprivation and abundance, grief and joy. With ferocious compassion for all that is overlooked and undervalued, Pape sings us toward an authentic vision of recovery.”
--LIA PURPURA, author of It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful
An origin story as painful as it is exquisite, Forgive the Animal manifests a self who has reckoned with the calamities of the past and arrived at a place of poised, tough lyricism. In poems that are candid about the brutalities of class, addiction, and desire, Sarah Pape brings together the “wild net” of memory and the “knit stitch” of craft to show what it means to go from wreckage to illumination, despair to sweetness. This beautiful book is ultimately about the idea of home—the home of the body, the home of family, the home of a place—and how home must be incessantly fought-for, earned, and saved.”
--RICK BAROT, author of Moving the Bones
