Praise

“A poetic chiaroscuro of grief over a planet and society in peril.” —Kirkus Reviews

“This is easily the best book yet from a poet already known for her unique blend of precise lyrical craft and somersaulting wit, brimming end-to-end with observations that slice through our complacency like a scalpel made of obsidian. But there’s also a wild kindness to these poems, a fierceness born from heartbreak and the realization that, yes, the same soil that gives us flowers is also filled with bones, hard and brittle in the dark.” —Michael Meyerhofer, Ragged Eden

“We have paved the Earth with chicken bones,” Barbara Ungar mourns in her breathtaking new collection, After Naming the Animals.  In a masterfully braided web of dread, humor, tenderness, brutal honesty, and exquisite lyricism, Ungar scrutinizes our human-made-apocalyptic world. After Naming the Animals provides the nourishment of becoming “your own neighborhood myth” while reconfiguring a relationship with the garden, a reckoning with our biblical, familial, and historical pasts. To name is also to plant a seed in “fertile ground in which to grow./ On the very last day, amidst the flames.” —Carlie Hoffman, When There Was Light, winner of the National Jewish Book Award