Garden of Beasts

Poetry. Most gardens aren't designed to accommodate beasts, with their rowdy and unpredictable behavior. Think of the tumult that might erupt inside a place meant to offer quiet refuge! But wait, is beauty not fierce and wild? With intensity and playfulness, through a variety of dreamlike settings, this collection takes old stories and focuses on their details as if they were paintings, and in the process continues the ancient and vital process of re- telling the tales we live by.

"Anita Sullivan's GARDEN OF BEASTS is lyric, intelligent, flamboyant, and wonderfully well-made. Best of all, it contains a rare kind of intuitive courage. Sentences are 'cracked open' to reveal 'an adoration of mountains/at dusk,' a performance of a Saint-Saens composition transports us to 'the beginning of the world, before glass.' In a time when so many books are satisfied with describing a world, GARDEN OF BEASTS works to transport us to one we couldn't otherwise have known."—Greg Glazner

"Anita Sullivan's poems are not message so much as music. She magically reveals 'How recklessly we live here in western Oregon/amid dark hills that move like mastodons/…loping beside the highway with mist astride their backs.' The poet sometimes puzzles, sometimes challenges, and always rewards the reader with striking, original imagery and glimpses into the mysterious reality of the other."—Barbara Drake

"As Anita Sullivan's lines sing, we awaken to our own shape-shifting, our own evolving, our own stretch towards mysterious chords. At home in her garden or on a Greek isle, this poet knows that 'every house is an entire world,' and that the quotidian, revealed in all its power, offers the fertility of many worlds…Composed of crows, of Bach, of loam and seed and sky, Sullivan's poems create in us 'secret noises we've never heard.'"—Peggy Shumaker