Cover image by Simen Johan
Creature considers what it means to be a living creature in an inherently inhospitable habitat, to attach oneself to others, to be an immigrant and a geographic nomad, a child and a parent—and what it means to live attuned to one’s own eventual extinction and the eventual extinction of species on a global level.
FOUR WAY BOOKS, 9/2023
selected as a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award
Order at fourwaybooks, bookshop, barnesandnoble or amazon
Creature is a brilliant book, a gift that fills needs we didn’t know we needed. At the crux of it is a voice that refuses to be nailed down to some single identity, a craft so capacious it evades even as it seduces. What Michael Dumanis manages in these poems is the variety and diversity inherent in any life when the one who’s living it is willing to pay attention: “I am solid gold, I say, and I am capable/of loving you until the final asteroid/hides Omaha under an ocean of ash,/but you’re unavailable.” This book is a word-drunk movement. I am so envious that I didn’t write it.
—JERICHO BROWN
Michael Dumanis’s Creature is the poetry book this year you have to read. Steeped in issues of morality, mortality, plasticity, and existence itself, Dumanis paints a picture of life that is as breathtakingly beautiful as it is terrifying. Just as Dumanis writes, “There’s more beyond / but not too much,” the book asks us over and over again what it means to be a living thing and the answer we are given is not simple or easy to swallow. Each poem’s landscape of perfectly chosen and placed language is a land to wish upon. For just as “Everything will be taken away before it’s handed back,” Creature tells us there is hope after loss, even if it is fractured. There is hope in this book, too, as it speaks: “I forget my life, but then I remember my life.” After all, there is poetry still to write which replaces the silence of death: “When I grow up, I do not want to be a headstone./ When I grow up, I want to be a book.” There’s no doubt that Creature contains the real poetry we have been waiting for for a very long time. Read it and feel your spirit cleansed with the truth of our present and our future—“we, who are about/ to steer our dinghy/ into the open sea.”
—DOROTHEA LASKY
In Creature, Michael Dumanis measures the divide between the inner and the outer worlds of an accomplished immigrant life. The poet's dark sense of irony provides a temporary relief from the weight of the immigrant loss but it cannot hide an unmoored heart, full of fevered self-scrutiny and longing. Creature is a gift of generosity to a divided, inconsolable human being.
—VALZHYNA MORT