Sleep on Needles - Richard Lyons - Bog

The poems in Sleep on Needles disperse human consciousness beyond us vs. them tribalism to create fleeting bonds with any number of species: a garlic flower, some gibbons, a Greenland shark, a nautilus, a blue whale, a rat. Trying to leave room for the impossible, these poems crave experience outside of language. They eschew convenient certainties including homo sapiens' historical claim of dominion over plants and animals. "Memory decants identity," one poem claims, and, thus, within these poems, identity and persona are on the move and always about to change.