Peter Reading, Faunal

This new volume opens with a quote from Charles Darwin: “We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence.” Faunal is a book of poems about animals, or more specifically about Reading’s real or imagined experiences of the beasts of the earth, and of the most powerful beast of all, humanity. The poems are peppered with Latin names which function as tags marking the animal world as the property of the linguistic universe constructed by people, and Reading’s main attention here is to the ways in which people interact with animals, usually to the detriment of the latter. (Courtesy of John Sears)