Rumored Animals

Winner of the 2010 American Poetry Journal Book Prize
In her debut, Latimer draws on sources from contemporary photography and art--Diane Arbus, Francesca Woodman, Donald Judd--to develop a complex engagement with constructions of self and prevailing cultural determinations of the female and feminine. In rich, robust sounds and rhythms, the poet strives to recognize herself within surface and image ("silver mirrors of ice," "a water pale body miming my own"), attempts to identify with the object of an outside gaze, figured as the looming presence of a brutally defining camera, and a discomfort at the fraught relation between herself as body and represented sign. More often than not, illusory, elusive reflective surfaces prove dangerously isolating ("Blue mirrors/ of lakes linger like glittery apprentices.... In their reflection, I stumble...") while the poet's consciousness of being seen and fixed by another is spiked with mistrust: "all borders are defined by/ a body and the water lapping against it./ Whose hands hold this picture?/ Whose eyes?" Negotiating contradictory urges to conceal and reveal identity, Latimer allows a quiet refusal to come fully into view. This is an impressive debut.-Publishers Weekly
Readers of new poetry have come to expect a certain amount of wonder in the work, a certain receptivity (here and there) to the non-rational, preternatural undercurrents which ordinarily reveal themselves to us with full force only every now and then. For some, poetry might even serve, in part, as a conservancy for that receptivity, a protected place for it to run free beyond the reach of all the paperwork and chatter. Rumored Animals is one such place. By turns ecstatic and grief-stricken, Quinn Latimer's poems-distinctive, audacious, elemental, and unyielding-render the world with all its strangenesses intact and vitality restored, asserting the legitimacy of another, more primal vision at odds with the agreed-upon, one where "mountains/ surround us with their animal/ prowl, throw back// their black capes/ and are done." This is a thrilling, defiant, and heartening body of work.-Timothy Donnelly, author of The Cloud Corporation
Quinn Latimer's voice rings familiar to the ears of the art-engaged public, her contributions to these pages constituting only a fraction of her expanding writing oeuvre. Possessing a strong critical overtone, it is, at bottom, a poetic voice that echoes the physical and mental environments of the subjects and landscapes she describes. Latimer's first collection of poems appears as a natural progression to her practice as an art critic. In Rumored Animals, poems serve a double purpose: they are the means by which their author constructs images of her desires and dreams, while affirming Latimer's own position among them. The texts manage to express a profoundly analytical responsiveness to the outside world, without ever losing track of their author's own self. Coming from Latimer, even subjectivity--as long as it is conscious--forms a part of a constructive and critical process of reflection.-Kaleidoscope