Manatee/Humanity

A fascinating new 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, a widely acclaimed poet, editor, performer, teacher, and activist, is the author of more than forty books and small press editions of poetry. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Award and the Shelly Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Waldman is the co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, where she is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Summer Writing Program.