Personhood

Thalia Field

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cover image of the book Personhood

Field’s frequently shifting scenes evoke Alice Notley, Anne Carson, and James Joyce.

— Publishers Weekly

A remarkable and moving cross-genre work about animal rights, by one of America’s foremost experimental writers

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Personhood

Literature by Thalia Field

Whether investigating refugee parrots, indentured elephants, the pathetic fallacy, or the revolving absurdity of the human role in the “invasive species crisis,” Personhood reveals how the unmistakable problem between humans and our nonhuman relatives is too often the derangement of our narratives and the resulting lack of situational awareness. Building on her previous collection, Bird Lovers, Backyard, Thalia Field’s essayistic investigations invite us on a humorous, heartbroken journey into how people attempt to control the fragile complexities of a shared planet. The lived experiences of animals, and other historical actors, provide unique literary-ecological responses to the exigencies of injustice and to our delusions of special status.

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Paperback(published May, 05 2021)

ISBN
9780811229739
Price US
16.95
Trim Size
6x9
Page Count
128

Ebook

ISBN
9780811229746
Portrait of Thalia Field

Thalia Field

Contemporary American fiction writer

Field’s frequently shifting scenes evoke Alice Notley, Anne Carson, and James Joyce.

— Publishers Weekly

Thalia Field does not settle on final answers but draws us into inquiries that unsettle our definitions. She is ignited by nature and the wild; she does not recoil from repelling us with factual talk; her book intends to move us to thoughtful action by destabilizing us with art.

— Anakana Schofield, Bookpost

Field draws from a variety of sources — scientific, historical, philosophical — to create a kind of text collage that nonetheless moves from point to point. Her sense of humor is witty and snarky….Field lands many a critical body blow to speciesism.

— Carl Little, Hyperallergic

A hybrid of essayistic fragments and poetic lines exploring the toxic relationship between humans and the animal world by way of myth, metaphor and science: “the forests have changed, the temperatures, / whole species gone north or south.”

— New York Times

Beautiful, harrowing, and singular— Field shows us what most people would rather not see, and to do so in a way that pushes and merges the boundaries of genre.

— Jo Ann Beard

Between the inward tension of the point and the outward push of the line, Thalia Field maps a force field of relations, power games, shifting configurations, in a language both cool and intense, and with a surveyor’s precision.

— Rosmarie Waldrop

Thalia Field’s curiosity and probe are infectious, tantalizing, irrepressible.

— Anne Waldman