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    Creature
    Creature
    Creature
    Ebook94 pages59 minutes

    Creature

    By Michael Dumanis

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    About this ebook

    Creature is a complex poetics of vitality, and it immaculately cleaves: even as it underscores how living in an inherently inhospitable environment will dispossess us of the world and one another, making animal of man, it sutures the rent evolutionary tree, glorifying the interdependence of each extant thing. Michael Dumanis expertly cultivates the multiplicity of language and makes of “creature” a marvelous contronym; we are a creature as in a beast, debased, beholden to nature, and we are creature as in an extension of creation, improbably sentient, mortal, here. In “Autobiography,” the speaker attests to the contradiction at the root of cognizance: “Am, as an animal, // anxious. Appendages always aflutter, / am an amazing accident: alive.” How does the human mammal embody both and neither — communal and itinerant, leaving home to approach it, as an immigrant and a geographic nomad, as someone’s child and another’s parent, as being and thing? How do we negotiate our ouroboric identities while attuned to not just our own fragility, but an impending global extinction event? The answer is the absence of answer. “In the beginning, I thought a great deal / about death and sunlight, et cetera,” Dumanis admits in “Squalor,” but “The Double Dream of Spring” absolves us of outsmarting impermanence. “O what a ball I had, spending the days.” And what should we do in this vernal brevity but exhaust it? We each only have so long to trace our hand “over the stony bones / that, fused together, hold [our] only face.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFour Way Books
    Release dateSep 15, 2023
    ISBN9781954245778
    Creature

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      Book preview

      Creature - Michael Dumanis

      Natural History

      I’m fully posable, a leather and clay creature

      with the capacity to waltz and do the Twist.

      My jaws unclench themselves. My eyes swing open.

      The world is young, and I still have some years,

      so I take out a patent on slow-moving fog.

      Take out a patent on the hyacinth.

      I brand the cow. Trademark the coelacanth:

      its tiny heart is shaped like a straight tube.

      However, the darkness keeps hitting

      me over the head with its hammer.

      I want to feel more substantial

      than an elephant wearing a fez,

      so I invent the Theory of Gravity,

      so I discover my larynx and use it,

      so I study yoga and learn how to wrap

      my legs around my neck, but I keep finding

      occasion to lie on the floor like a slug

      or weep into the rented furniture,

      so I invent the Bhagavad Gita,

      so I invent the Gutenberg Bible,

      so I invent the Etch-a-Sketch and draw

      myself a lover with the right proportions,

      we go on holiday and sit in traffic,

      I do my best not to erase her, not to

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