we, animals

A visual poetry collection of nontraditional, multimodal compositions on the subjects of love, desire, pain, pleasure, and gender identity. This book is in no way a guide on how to behave when you're in love, but at the core, these are love poems. Loving freely requires a lack of constraint. We want to be bound, but we want the bindings to be the ones we choose.

"In we animals, Nicole Oquendo doesn't just evoke fur and claw and quickened heart: they inhabit. Here, the deep intimacy built between so-called predator and prey (self and other, self and self) tangles and untangles in an endless knot of relating. Here, a narrative of emergence arcs towards lyrical decomposition: "when the end comes i will bend you like a star / and kiss you sticky the curves of you animal / until we the last island drown." Here, sounds, forms, and images pulse together with blood's electricity. These are words to read aloud, to wrestle with, to be cornered by, to hold."

-- D. Allen, A Bony Framework for the Tangible Universe (The Operating System, 2019)

"Dear Intrepid Reader: This book is alive. How do I know this? Because many things have tried to quiet it, and none have been successful. If you are lucky enough to be holding it in your hands at this moment, considering it, turn to page 50. I dare you to walk away from it now. we, animals is unlike anything you have ever experienced. Note that I do not say "read", because:

"One, there is more at work in these pages than poetry, art, and magic, and

"Two, because you don't read this book - it reads you. Are you ready to experience it? I hope that you are.

"Where magic, horror, identity, and reclamation intersect, you will find we, animals. From the experimental, oracular beauty of cassandra's eyes and the rasping apocalypse of rhh, we, animals guides the reader to the terrible beauty and terrifying precipice of myth, folk tale, and the narratives of self that we all construct - only to dismantle those ideas, page by page, reconstructing them into something new, something, fierce - something with teeth."

-- Allie Marini, author of This Apiary, Here Comes Hell, and Southern Cryptozoology: A Field Guide to Beasts of the Southern Wild