Creature

I read “Creature,” by Kathryn Kirkpatrick in the late hours, quietly, and perhaps not intended by the author, but in one sitting. Images of a crow on an arm, the poet’s arm, the other arm bracing her mother. A chain of connection between nature and an elderly mother and daughter. “Okay/ I’ll pay attention, I say.” As the night turned over from an ice winter and a spring season breaking through, I meandered deep into the sediment of living, living with creatures and living with the creature in ourselves.  

Kirkpatrick is a Professor of English at Appalachian State University. She teaches environmental literature, animal studies, and Irish studies from an ecofeminist perspective. Kirkpatrick also co-directs the animal studies minor, a multi-disciplinary program that she helped found. Kirkpatrick has published essays on class trauma, eco-feminist poetics, and animal studies, focusing particularly on the work of Dublin poet Paula Meehan. Her monograph on Meehan’s work, Enraptured Space, is from West Virginia University Press (2025).  She is co-editor of Animals in Irish Literature and Culture (2015), which includes her essay on the representation of foxes in Somerville and Ross’s Irish PM stories. As well as a scholar and editor, Kirkpatrick is the author of eight collections of poetry, including three recipients of the NC Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell award, The Body’s Horizon (1996), Our Held Animal Breath (2012), and Her Small Hands Were Not Beautiful (2014). The Fisher Queen: New & Selected Poems (Salmon, 2019) received the NC Literary and Historical Society’s Roanoke Chowan Poetry Prize. Creature was published by Jacar Press in 2025.

Jacar Press is a Community Active press publishing fine, diverse poetry in traditional and collectible formats. They host free and low-cost workshops, conferences and conversations. Jacar Press proceeds go to support progressive groups and individuals working to create change in their communities.  Jacar Press books are produced by a printer that uses 100% sustainable methods. They do not receive grants or university support.

“Creature” is structured into three sections: Creatures, Created and Canines. Relationships and connections are bedrock throughout these sections, encounters with animals and the teachings they convey become anchors, talons. Crafted in various forms, pantoum, villanelle and nonce forms, rhyme is used to bring forward orientations with animals, crows, calves and dogs. The reader walks with Kirkpatrick through her relationship with her mother, through to the final section as dogs make appearances and show their depth of meaning to the poet. 

The collection is bookended by two separate poems beyond the three sections. The first poem, “On Finding Monarch Caterpillars in September,” sets a somber tone in entering the collection. Monarch butterflies, wWho are no metaphor, who stand for/ themselves only, though in my ecological/ worry, my long-range fright, I am surely/standing for something as I shovel the dark.” The autonomy of nature is made, a stance taken, animals will not function as symbolism or motif, the natural world retains its power and is respected in literature. Speaking to monarch butterflies that typically live two to six weeks, this cycle, the butterflies encountered in September, they will live longer, months longer because of their migrations and because of the timing of their birth. 

The ending poem, “Postlude: At 65, the Garden,” leaves the reader with a quiet, but powerful reflection. “It was winter, or something/ like it, and still, there was more I could do.”  Still, there was more I could do…. Even in the pit of a season of hibernation, when nature curls back in wait for warmer days and the running of waters, the poet can still tend to her garden, still continuing to prepare it for the days of bud and bloom. 

 Creature is not something stalking from the dark, threatening. Creature is vulnerable as a newborn, a vulnerability that forces gentleness from us, a maternal love. The title poem, “Creature,” conveys a moment of the poet finding a newborn creature, “mislaid by the mother.” Despite being “too small,” “too young to live,” and “too much to monitor,” she tries. The poet tries to save this “wild tenacious life,” and in the crux of the creaturely vulnerability of these wild clinging lives, abandoned and existing in pits of harsh environments. Even through our caverns of dark lives, still, there is more we can do. What we remember, because in the end, the human has only their memories, is to the poet, an “eager taking in of what I offered.” 

“Creature” pushes us to pay attention, to not reduce the animal world we are immersed in to literary devices. Kirkpatrick articulates of her collection that:

“Writing poetry always teaches you something that you didn’t know you knew, according to Kathryn. And to create and write a certain kind of poem, you have to become a certain kind of person, a person who wants to know more about how other animals experience the world.”

Our creaturely tendency is not about becoming harsh when responding to adverse environments, but to remain tender. 

I recommend “Creature” for the late hours, when the creature stirs. 

Thank you to Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Jacar Press for a complimentary copy in request for an honest review.