Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer
Bad Animal is a collection of poems about the body, about violence, about safety, a meditation on love, sex, and death. It explores the body’s changing relationship to desire in the aftermath of incredible sexual trauma, and how we societally reconcile the beauty of the world we live in with intense emotional pain. Bad Animal is a collection of poems that remind the reader we are all made of flesh and bone and while flesh is temporary and fragile, bone is hard and resilient: both are needed to be whole. Nature is present throughout these poems which echoes the real world-a world that needs both vulture and carcass, a world that needs both dark and light.
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Oh, Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer’s Bad Animal is a marvelously macabre and bewitching book! Here is a poet who plunges headlong into haunting intersections of faith, nature, sex, and violence, evoking for us the allures and the horrors of death, enlivening the body and stirring up questions about the future. Conjuring a world where Danger sometimes wears the face of Pleasure, and vice versa, these poems unfold a menagerie of incisive, visceral images you won’t soon forget. Bratt-Pfotenhauer’s language glows and pulses like an ember in the dark.
Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat Bad Animal is fierce, smart, knows language as a kind of mating dance with the reader, a lever into the interior, and a demon possession. It’s aware of its body as text and texture, a source of hurt and a source of rapture. It has a hawk heart and a crow mind. Bad Animal is memorable for its avidity, its “renegade” desire, its scholarship of “little violences”. It puts you under a spell. It gallops inside you.
Bruce Smith, author of Devotions
It’s a miracle for a poetry collection to wind up so smart and so moving at once. I read Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer’s Bad Animal in one gulp, then reopened it and started over, for it rewards study. Brave new offering to the literary world, and the first of many books I’ll buy from this astonishing young poet. Buy this book!
Mary Karr, author of Tropic of Squalor and The Liar’s Club
Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer’s Bad Animal subtly questions the contours of comfort throughout the inevitable cycles of life-beginnings, endings, death, pain, love. This book is at once a soothing lyrical balm with the sonic authority of a bomb. Read it and experience the power of a deftly written and precisely conceived work of art.
Airea D. Matthews, author of Simulacra & Bread and Circus
