Survivor Animalia

By Cassandra Myers

A powerful and breathtaking poetic justice taxonomy for those left alive after impact

In this debut collection that moves through the tangled aftermath of sexual violence, Cassandra Myers rejects the familiar grammar of predator and prey, wolf and sheep, deer and shotgun. Instead, these poems gather around creatures that fit into the sticky-sick liminal spaces of survival. By turns feral, tender, and incandescent, Myers's poems braid personal narrative with ecological observation, survivor testimony with metamorphosis, cultural refusal with the strange intelligence of the natural world. Here, healing is neither linear nor pure. It molts. It scavenges. It mimics death.

Birthing the upside-down cross of the defence cascade, these poems move through revenge fantasies, frozen winters of self-blame, unexpected kinships, and the slow return of tenderness. Refusing bone-clean survivor carceralities, Survivor Animalia asks what becomes possible when we look to more-than-human life as a luminous companion for anyone learning how to live after the unthinkable.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H6ZSV92Q
• ISBN13: 9781834050645
• Release Date: April 2027
• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Length: 96 Pages