Invertebrate

Invertebrate by E Walker turns its attention toward desire, faith, and the strangeness of embodied life, finding in slugs, scorpions, and cicadas both an unlikely erotics and an unlikelier theology. Guilt arrives early here, in childhood cruelty to snails, and never quite leaves, shading into the anxious theology of a classroom silverfish and the accusatory moths of an insomniac mind, whilst queer desire and identity run through these poems alongside creatures that are hermaphroditic, self-generating, and endlessly transforming. Witty, tender, and unsqueamish, Invertebrate insists that the smallest lives are large enough to hold our appetites, our guilt, and our capacity for change.