Some Animal

Shipley assembles the micro-positions of gender with such moment-to-moment clarity we sense a kinescopic effect. Gender becomes movement, time, the growth of flowers and beards, and even the poetic arcs of a strengthening voice. Shipley fits himself into himself, with lightness and depth.

“When she becomes he, people are confused, some are even angry,” writes Shipley (Boy with Flowers) in this riveting exploration of what it means to come of age in a genderqueer body. The collection’s four linked memoirs adopt a ranging, hybrid form… What sets this book apart is its focused attention to the experience of defying the gender binary, of being in a body that intimates and strangers alike are bent on denying.

Some Animal, Ely Shipley’s prose/poetry/bildungsroman hybrid, makes itself intimate with the domesticating narratives enforcing and reinforcing constraints on our bodies and identities. It seems for this reason, Some Animal so explicitly takes on, wears, and disrobes a decidedly Western and White canon of poems and writings, assuming the shapes of “Large albino snakes” and “White roots.” (Ovid’s Metamorphoses, alongside Dickinson’s “A narrow Fellow in the Grass,” Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” and Keats’ Lamia, supplies the poetic heritage, while the Havelock Ellis’s 1897 text Sexual Inversion provides the dominant pathological survey.)

Ely Shipley’s long-awaited second collection, Some Animal (2018), evades category and convention. Where his debut collection Boy with Flowers (2007) offered tightly crafted individual poems, Some Animal shakes off the constraints of page and poem to take readers on what can truly be called an epic journey: into gender dysphoria and out into a world still rife with transphobia and hatred. Given the sheer magnitude of the experience his book presents, nothing but an expansive take on poetry would do it justice.

Entropy’s Best of 2018: Best Poetry Books & Poetry Collections