Bad Animal is a collection of poems about the body, about violence, about safety, a meditation on love, sex, and death. It explores the body's changing relationship to desire in the aftermath of incredible sexual trauma, and how we societally reconcile the beauty of the world we live in with intense emotional pain. Bad Animal is a collection of poems that remind the reader we are all made of flesh and bone and while flesh is temporary and fragile, bone is hard and resilient: both are needed to be whole. Nature is present throughout these poems which echoes the real world-a world that needs both vulture and carcass, a world that needs both dark and light.
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Oh, Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer's Bad Animal is a marvelously macabre and bewitching book! Here is a poet who plunges headlong into haunting intersections of faith, nature, sex, and violence, evoking for us the allures and the horrors of death, enlivening the body and stirring up questions about the future. Conjuring a world where Danger sometimes wears the face of Pleasure, and vice versa, these poems unfold a menagerie of incisive, visceral images you won't soon forget. Bratt-Pfotenhauer's language glows and pulses like an ember in the dark.Bruce Smith, author of Devotions
Mary Karr, author of Tropic of Squalor and The Liar's Club