We are excited to announce Aracelis Girmay’s Kingdom Animalia as the August selection for the August Rumpus Poetry Book Club. This poetry collection, published by BOA Editions is the winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for 2011. Author Chris Abani deemed it, “a beautiful evocation of the bittersweet complexities of the human heart and a treatise on on the ever evolving journey to understanding and transcendence.”
This is Girmay’s second collection of poems. Prefaced with a quote by Charles Darwin, the poems carry on this evolutionary theme—examining the world where “everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set of teeth and language. These are poems about what is both difficult and beautiful about our time here on earth.”
This month’s poetry book is compelling, but this kind of indie press-generated excitement can be yours every month as part of the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. It’s $22 (domestic) for the book, and comes with an online chat with the author, the rare pleasure of owning a book roughly a month prior to its release date, and the opportunity see your own written review published on the Rumpus. Find out more details here.
(And check out August’s Rumpus Book Club selection, too.)
