Description:
At turns humorous and heartbreaking, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named explores in both formal and free verse what it means to die, which is to say, also, what it means to live. In this collection, Sealey displays an exquisite sense of the lyric, as well as an acute political awareness. Never heavy-handed or dogmatic, the poems included in this slim volume excavate the shadows of both personal and collective memory and are, at all points, relentless. To quote the poet herself, here is a debut as luminous and unforgiving "as the unsparing light at tunnel's end."
Review Quotes: "... this is a collection that reveals what I consider to be the true power of poetry--that a poem is a code, a rogue computer virus, a simulacrum all at once, and that it performs a gentle act of revolution not only against singular meaning, but against the reader's and even the poet's attempts to control and deploy it in singular ways." --Chris Abani