A Brief Report On The Human Animal
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A BRIEF REPORT ON THE HUMAN ANIMAL
by Kathleen M. Heideman
* 3rd Place, 2023 International 3-Day Poetry Chapbook Contest
Kathleen Heideman’s A Brief Report on the Human Animal is both love poem and execution order, a confabulation of a creature that’s “lovely in her bones” and also a “voracious hunter / which stalks and kills and caches its prey.” From “In the Beginning” to our current epoch of “Global Weirding,” each page pulses/bleeds with both affection and shame for all that humanity has wrought and wrecked in the geologic seconds of its existence. Heideman’s poems aren’t simply artful meditations on who we were/are/will be. They’re word mirrors, reflecting the “unreliable, delightful mishmash” of human and animal through the ash heap of history. There is nothing brief about this book. A Brief Report on the Human Animal will remain etched like petroglyphs on the cave walls of your heart.