Zoodikers

<p class=ql-align-justify><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>To understand anything-or to attempt to-is to discover how distinctions and similarities conflux flip muddle resist meld blur and reflect. Boundaries are plastic if not arbitrary the world and its inhabitants are fragile everything is interconnected and </span><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)><em>Zoodikers: A Bestiary</em></strong><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> is Flower Conroy's endeavor to write through and towards this. Part personal inventory part existential dread meditation part hope anthem this </span><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>collection of prose poems</strong><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> ferociously explores the realities bedeviling its speakers: </span><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>aging the body sickness extinction sex and sexuality queerness life birth childlessness death the future the past AI what is human as well as what is animal</strong><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>. Juxtaposing syntax and musicality language play and gallows humor acute observations and philosophic wonderings myth superstition and fact Conroy invokes and evokes questions of what it means to be human or animal or other. Feral perturbed zany scrutinizing these poems shapeshift; appearances aren't necessarily fixed and animation is questionable-from what is life what is death what's in between to how to determine degrees of consciousness: isn't a chemical process a type of cognition? What is the nature of being in a coma? What's this centipede thinking? The poems are microcosms unto themselves and yet interwoven through subtext concern and voracity of information and imagination. Lucidity slips into hallucinatory and vice versa as Conroy navigates what it means to be alive in this weird and wild shared existence.</span></p><p></p>