Nauset Press

$12.00, 68 pages

Review by Rachel Mennies 

Because it’s the worst place in the world to find the correct answer to anything, and because I never take my own advice, I type one of Looking for Small Animals’ lingering-after-I-finish-the-book subtexts, “Are humans animals?”, into Yahoo Answers. And chris160444, his avatar a growling, wild fox, gives me an answer that I believe McDonnell might echo: “The worst animals on the planet,” my new friend chris says, “are humans.”

The tameless, yet complicated animals inside us come alive early in Looking for Small Animals: “The animal started lashing at fifteen,” the speaker of McDonnell’s poem “The Moth” tells us. We read this collection, McDonnell’s first, to see where the animal leads us: to understand what an at-times-savage, at-times-peaceful human speaker can teach us about a world gone machine, about our distances from and connection to our nonhuman co-citizens. Continue reading →