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“Stanley Kunitz once noted that a first book of poetry is often an act of ‘creating the myth of oneself.’ Beasts for the Chase is, in part, such an act—imagine if Hart Crane had written fairy tales—and yet Monica Ferrell embraces the thorny contradictions inherent in such a project. Within the space of one poem (‘At The White Quay’) we find a speaker who declares ‘For I am so vast, my mouth / Encompasses you as the universe / Takes a star,’ as well as ‘I could not weep / But turned back to the tinker shop / Where I was welding together a terrible robot.’ The mythmaking in these poems is fierce and wildly original—this is a thrilling new poetic voice.” —Nick Flynn
“Monica Ferrell’s poems obliterate the false distinction between thought and feeling, between reflection and passionate lyricism. They draw us into a profound and lavish interior world where what is experienced and what is thought about what is experienced are both transfigured by a mastery of the expressive power of language that is as precise as it is ecstatic.” —Vijay Seshadri
By turns sumptuous and stark, the thirty-eight poems of Monica Ferrell’s debut collection carry us along on a breathless pursuit. Here the hunting grounds are lushly imagined landscapes drawn from both fantasy and the familiar—a drowned Atlantis, the hospital room where a baby is born, a kitchen where two lovers vie—and our quarry the perilous raptures of creaturely existence. What lies at the heart of this work is a fearless and generous spirit, undaunted in its quest to fully meet experience. Whether she speaks through the mask of an emperor’s orphaned son or in the sly cadences of modern street-talk, the urgency propelling Ferrell’s poems can always be discerned, pulsing in the beat of her fierce music, peering out from her riotous imagery. The effect of such language is enchantment—what Nabokov claimed as the primary function of literature. Beasts for the Chase is an audacious, assured debut, and Monica Ferrell is a young poet who has already found her own wild voice.
Monica Ferrell was born in 1975 in New Delhi, India. A former “Discovery”/The Nation prizewinner and Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is currently an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Purchase College. Her poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Tin House, Fence, and Boston Review, among other magazines. Her first novel, The Answer Is Always Yes, was published by The Dial Press in 2008.
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