Estrus

In a distinctive voice that is at once both mythic, in a fable-telling kind of way, and realistic, in a no-punches-pulled kind of way, William Neumire's new book, Estrus, charts our desire for connection and the forces that keep us from connecting. The person behind these poems is the "worst Buddhist" because he wants "something out of everything," yet is living, like all of us, in a world of "Marxist disconnection," in which, cut off from the rhythms of life, we live in "urges," "amazed [only] by how little we know of ourselves." These are poems of great yearning, which like "animals in estrus will run/for miles through traffic & snow & bullets" in order to "collapse with bloom" rather than be extinguished by soul-less work in "factories that do not close."~ Robert Cording