Strange Animals - Emily Vanderploeg

Strange Animals is collection of experiences - its thread is the author's journey from childhood home to settling across an ocean, moving through the vagaries of modern love as she travels to new cities and a newfound maturity, whilst contemplating the end of youth and what one loses and gains in the process. Throughout these journeys, strange animals appear in the poems, challenging and disrupting both the author's and the reader's experience, asking questions and forcing us to both see and to look at life in curious new ways.

A Canadian grandchild of Dutch and Hungarian immigrants, Emily Vanderploeg explores issues of language, ritual, death and identity in poems about her family which open the collection in a close intimate space, which is then ruptured as she and the poems travel to Wales and elsewhere, physically and emotionally, leading us to look at the world through the experiences of animals as people and people as animals, culminating in a sequence of poetry as Tarot - leaving the reader with a fortune told, but more questions than answers.