The Uncollected Animals

“Monumental!” ―Kwame Dawes, Poet Laureate of Jamaica and author of Sturge Town

Leading poet and activist John Kinsella brings together a major international collection of contemporary and historical poetry that speaks to the rights and welfare of animals.

The Uncollected Animals is a unique anthology of poetry based around all non-human animal life, with the welfare and rights of animals at the forefront. The anthology includes fifty-seven commissioned poems, and other poems provided by poets specifically for the anthology. These are set against an historical context of animal-referencing poems that range in time from ancient Greece to the 21st century. Kinsella’s introduction offers insights into the eternal relationship of poetry to animals, and the creative arrangement of the poems yields startling contrasts and alliances that will draw readers into a powerful relationship with the work.

The book includes 165 poems representing some sixteen countries and many different cultures. Together, this collective utterance respects and conserves a great variety of perspectives. Writing in a full range of styles, the diverse voices found inside include poets from Aristophanes, Blake, Coleridge, Du Fu, Melville, and Wordsworth to Anne Carson, CAConrad, Kimiko Hahn, Paul Laurence Dunbar, D.H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, and Marianne Moore, to important young voices, to performer/lyricists such as Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. At all times, animals, their rights, and their welfare are at the fore, be they invertebrates, bird, mammal, reptile, amphibian, or fish.

In a time of human-induced mass extinctions and rapid human-induced climate change, this subject could not be more vital and necessary for all of us to consider, embrace, and act on with empathy.