Advanced Search Request a Book

ORDERS

Readings Orders 0

DEMANDS

Readings Demands 0

Dear Specimen:Poems
[Paperback - 2021]
w.j. herbert
On Demand
Availability in 4-6 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: $16
Our Price: Rs.3645 Rs.3098
Standard Discount: 15%
You Save: Rs.547
Category: Literature
Sub-category: Poetry
Publisher: Beacon Press | ISBN: 9780807007594 | Pages: 112
Shipping Weight: .153 | Dimensions: 5.49 x .33 x 8.49 inches

Description

A National Poetry Series winner, selected and with a foreword by Kwame Dawes.

A 5-part series of interwoven poems from a dying parent to her daughter, examining the human capacity for grief, culpability, and love, asking: do we as a species deserve to survive?

Dear Specimen opens with both its speaker and her planet in peril. In “Speak to Me,” she puzzles over a millipede, as if the blue rune of its body could help her understand her impending death and the crisis her species has created. Throughout the collection, poems addressed to specimens echo the speaker’s concern and amplify her wonderment. A catalog of our climate transgressions, Dear Specimen’s final poem foretells a future in which climate refugees overrun one of our planet’s last habitable places.

The collection’s lifeblood is a series of poems in which the speaker and her daughter express their concern for, and devotion to, one another. The daughter’s questions mirror the ones her mother asks of specimens: what are we meant to do with so much hazard and wonder? When the speaker hints at the climate crisis in a bedtime story she tells her grandson, we, too, feel the peril he may face.

Juxtaposing a profound sense of intimacy with the vastness of geological time, the collection offers a climate-conscious critique of the human species—our search for meaning and intimacy, our capacity for greed and destruction. Dear Specimen is an extended love letter and dire warning, not only to the daughter its speaker leaves behind but to all of us.

About the Author

W. J. Herbert’s work was awarded the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize and was selected by Natasha Trethewey for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2017. Her poetry, fiction, and reviews appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, Hudson Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she was raised in Southern California where she earned a bachelor’s in studio art and a master’s in flute performance. She lives in Kingston, New York, and Portland, Maine.

Bestsellers in Literature

View All
Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass
[Hardback - 2020]
lana del rey
In Stock
List Price: £16.99
Our Price: Rs.4245 Rs.3820
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.425
Only Dull People Are Brilliant At Breakfast: Little Black Classics 119
[Paperback - 2016]
oscar wilde
Out of Stock
Availability in 2-4 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: £3
Our Price: Rs.645 Rs.580
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.65
Conversations On Love
[Paperback - 2022]
natasha lunn
Out of Stock
Availability in 2-4 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: £10.99
Our Price: Rs.2395 Rs.2155
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.240
Healing Through Words
[Hardback - 2022]
rupi kaur
In Stock
List Price: £16.99
Our Price: Rs.5045 Rs.4540
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.505
The Night Is Darkening Round Me: Little Black Classics 63
[Paperback - 2015]
emily bronte
Out of Stock
Availability in 2-4 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: £3
Our Price: Rs.645 Rs.580
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.65
Kunj-E-Qafas (Urdu)
[Hardback - 2023]
fawad hassan fawad
In Stock
List Price: Rs.2500
Our Price: Rs.2500 Rs.2250
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.250