Robert Wrigley loves the animals—or at least he loves to write poems about them. Wrigley's epigraph for this collection is from D. H. Lawrence, and so is the half of his aesthetic that has to do with primitive carnal urges and actions ("He's got to peel and pull / the hide and hack away her head, section her / mid-spine"). Wrigley's approach is otherwise derived from the world of contemporary American poetry, and this side of things mostly has to do with wandering around outside, watching the moon rise, and saying things like, "I am myself / obsessed of late with God," or "And again I am deep inside my own life." When these two almost contradictory impulses come together, the results can be odd and interesting. "Winter Bale," for example, seems to be a standard poem about seasons and mutability, but becomes something altogether different when it shifts, in its final stanza, to the image of a snake sliding into a horse's stall. More frequently, however, the work here isn't intriguing so much as regrettable—and in peculiar ways. Here are some representative stanzas from the book's title poem:

once, my lover
plucked from the tip of my ear,
with a divot of skin,
a tick already fastened on
and fattening with my blood.
She kissed the wound there
and did not stop
kissing, but held the tick
between her thumb and forefinger
all through the love that followed,
then expelled what I'd left her
in the toilet.

Is this a postmodern John Donne joke? No, it is not. The speaker of the poem proceeds to have a dream about being a tick himself (or possibly another animal; it's hard to say), and consequently retrieves the previous night's tick from the toilet (even the tick had to be nonplussed by this turn of events), and finally deliberately fastens the tick on the family dog. If there is any justice in the world, the dog responded by biting the hell out of him.

— David Orr