Correct Animal
by Rebecca Farivar
Octopus Books, 2011
$12.00

Yes, this is an animal, cooing under terse lines mirroring old fashioned poetic disturbances. Disturbances in the sense that young poets can be terrorized by mere existence too. Farivar writes

If she wants
to say bird
not finch
not starling
not snipe

let her

This is how to break a heart, to rip into poem flesh and say “give me some space to breathe,” to show a subtleness in what plagues the poet that can at once be gendered and completely not. All I want to do is synchronize my movements with this animal. All I want to do is be correct too.

—A. Minetta Gould