THE ENDLESS ANIMAL
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From the publisher: "The poems in The Endless Animal dwell where the desire-haunted habitat of human consciousness meets the animal kingdom of actual and archetypal beasts. Alongside lyrically charged explorations, you’ll find a Basho-inspired haibun that invokes both David Bowie and the ghosts of Kyoto, an 11th-century monk obsessed with fashioning wings, and the first NASA space monkey to survive returning to Earth from orbit. In this collection, Nathan Mader wrestles with bisexual eroticism, art, spirituality, various animal ecologies, and the notions of masculinity he encountered growing up on the Canadian prairies while remaining open to the endless imaginative possibilities of poetry."
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"After reading the first sentence—‘I was as an orchid wearing nothing but / the light.’—I was instantly hooked. This sentence is indicative of the rest of the book. Imagery that deepens wonder and a reckoning gaze abounds. The speakers interrogate the spectrum and the outcomes of violence: guns, rote masculinity, drones, and extinction. The Endless Animal is a timely and beautifully written book."
-Eduardo C. Corral​, author of Guillotine (Graywolf)
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"Nathan Mader’s poems, in their highest moments of vision, see eternity and the animal in a non-contradiction. They say that our world exists ‘between / mastery and rapture, craft and caress’ by doing the same themselves. Mader writes a prophetic memory of witnessing ‘ten thousand birds / becoming one mind’ and how once ‘we rose / up together to meet them."
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-A.F. Moritz, author of As Far As You Know (Anansi)
"The Endless Animal is a beguiling, brilliant and paradoxical exploration of the world we inhabit yet strain to fully perceive. A poem about a nineteenth-century spirit photographer, attempting to put the ineffable in his frame, expresses the double struggle of the poet to see in the light of poetic mystery, and to be seen as a subject in that light. A superabundance of curiosity animates this collection, whose questions of knowing and being put strange things into play, not limited to the animal proxies through whom humans test their metaphysical impulses: prim dowager monkeys sent into space, tigers hunted with perfume. Readers will marvel at this poetry’s high formality and its ability to be philosophical and sensual at the same time. If Emily Dickinson expressed the manifold potential of her life in the phrase “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –,” then the reverberations of that shot pass through this collection, striking and sounding in altogether new ways."
-Medrie Purdham, author of Little Housewolf (Véhicule Press)
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"Nathan Mader’s The Endless Animal brims with a wisdom surprising and uncommon in a first book. The poems migrate across the North American West and on to Japan, in a collection concerned with time, sexuality, pop culture, and that most elegant and elusive animal—spirit. Readers encounter Rodin sculptures in civic centers in Nebraska, Blake’s tiger in a taxidermy exhibit, and David Bowie in a Zen Garden. The renderings are sharp—precise as a chef’s knife that can ‘part a salmon like a pair of lips.’ Here is a mind dwelling ‘between / mastery and rapture’ and returning us with gratitude ‘to the things of this earth.’ An auspicious debut."
-Randy Lundy, author of Field Notes for the Self (Oskana Poetry and Poetics)
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Nathan Mader’s poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead, Plenitude, The Ex-Puritan, The Antigonish Review, Grain, PRISM, Vallum, Rilking, Kyoto Journal, and The New Quarterly. He was included in The Best Canadian Poetry (Biblioasis/Tightrope) and was a finalist for The Walrus Poetry Prize.
PRESS / OTHERS
A bit about my Writing Space @ TNQ​​​​