Flesh Enough

Look at Darla Himeles, there on the razor's edge of survival as a Jew, note-taker of past and future extinctions, a poet fearless of science, unafraid of love or laughter. Listen as she sings love songs to the cephalopod dead, the manatees' eyes "cataracted by microplastics," and the Colorado that "forgets it's a river." Smile as she imagines T.S. Eliot becoming a blue crab. Meditate with her on our own eyes, possible "reservoirs of the Anthropocene's / last sunlit hours." Himeles helps us know our place as specks of a star, kin to all animals, in poems that dance with the pleasure of language.

-Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light