By Vera Hadzic
In this debut collection, Ontario poet Vera Hadzic explores themes of anxiety, eating, excretion, compulsion, and change. Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery follows the construction and deconstruction of the body, both human and animal.
These poems take the form of travel poetry, ekphrasis, and narrative to navigate personal and public history, and personal and public constructions of self and time. Drawing on history, art, and literature, the poems in this collection strive to mediate the inside and the outside of the self, probing at the anxious impulses to contain oneself and, at the same time, break open.
A FEED DOG BOOK
ADVANCE PRAISE
“The poems in Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery have an astonishing richness to them on par with the most decadent Dutch still-life paintings—and, like those packed canvases, their sumptuousness is shot through with a closeness to death, with the reminder that all bodies are made of ‘tearable gossamer film.’ With penetrative, startling intelligence, Vera Hadzic shows us the insides of things: animals, the great cracking orb of religious belief, our very bones and what they structure and encase. To read this book is to be plunged deep into an ocean of textures, to probe everything from ‘shelves of coiling igneous / rugae’ to the ‘glittering invisibilities of bacterial proliferation.’ Out of the indelible facts of blossoming and decay, Hadzic constructs a gothic Wunderkammer in which ‘a human being/is an encoded/thing—a thing/of domes/and towers.’ Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery is a towering achievement, and with it, Vera Hadzic has established herself as a poetic force of nature.”
—Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, author of A Brief History of Fruit
