Consider the Rooster

Bokbokboook alert! What tremendously revitalizing work. A song to roost and roast yourselves to. Thank you for this most thorough of educations, Oliver. An education we can’t afford to neglect or forget.

At the forefront of queer Latinx ecopoetics, Bendorf is a great composer-composter of poems whose work never surrenders to ecological crisis, insisting on queer and trans futures beyond empire. Poetry here is the language of our becoming free and our “becoming particulate,” guiding us “toward pleasure / from future / gravestones.”

This visionary book of queer ecological thought asks: how can we make a home when home is a harm? Looking to more-than-human companions for cues as to when to fight, when to run, when to grow, and when to fuck, Consider the Rooster also reads like a survival guide for ethical ecological sluts. “Third eye is a gloryhole,” Bendorf writes, inviting us into this home without harm: “door’s open/soup’s on.” In the face of colonialism, capitalism, transphobia, and other intransigent systems of violence, Bendorf embraces transience and transition as forms of resistance.

Oliver Baez Bendorf’s third collection, Consider the Rooster, compels us to heed this bird’s clarion song, reminding us of the ways we are constrained by capitalism and conformity. As the poet journeys back to a wild self, he says, “it’s time to leave, and what seems inevitable sometimes / is, no matter whether or not you stay to watch.” This collection nurtures hope with its keen attention to the natural world, ultimately revealing the possibility of an uncontained wildness both outside and within.