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Manatee/Humanity

Part of Penguin Poets

Author Anne Waldman

Paperback

$24.00 US

Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books

6"W x 9.02"H x 0.4"D | 6 oz | 64 per carton

On sale Apr 07, 2009 | 144 Pages | 9780143115212

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A fascinating work from an internationally renowned poet

Anne Waldman's new investigative hybrid-poem explores the nuances of inter-species communication and compassion. It draws on animal lore, animal encounters (with grey wolf and manatee), dreams, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and Buddhist ritual to render a text of remarkable sympathy, reciprocity, and power. The poem asks questions as well as urges further engagement with the endangered (including our human selves). Part performance litany, part survival kit, part worried mammalian soundings, Waldman explores, as ever, what it means to inhabit our condition through language and imagination inside a wheel of time. This is the mature work of a philosophical field poet with a shamanic metabolism.

Anne Waldman is a revered poet, performer, professor, editor, and cultural activist. She is the author of more than forty-five books, including Gossamurmur, Manatee/Humanity, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and the feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy, which won the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. The recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Before Columbus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Waldman makes her home in New York City and in Boulder, Colorado, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Writing and Poetics and artistic director of the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University. View titles by Anne Waldman

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“This sprawling book-length poem from an American countercultural giant takes its form and concerns from a Tibetan Buddhist ritual and from the poet’s close encounter with the endangered aquatic mammal of her title . . . Waldman’s energetic odes and dialogues, part memory and part dream, may learn from the manatee what it is to be human; they also try to understand the nonhuman, from seaweeds and seashells to mammals . . . Exuberant . . . Waldman figures the gap between mind and body as the gap between air and sea, between the manatee’s world and our own.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“Waldman brings her wild, oracular voice to the environmental questions that currently bedevil us . . . Waldman uses both rhetorical and visual devices to demand our attention, but her work is predominantly incantatory . . . One of Waldman’s strongest books.”
—Booklist

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