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paper • 68 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-935536-48-2

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Animalities

David Dodd Lee

Reading Animalities is like inhaling and exhaling innumerable versions of life—and like life, these poems embrace “carnage and joy”: “the sun on the horizon bleeding…/ where the loons swim in it by moonlight still laughing.” The curious juxtaposition of the familiar with the surreal—“the flaming peonies,” “black lemons floating on white water. ”—contemplates the question, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”

“I’ll Be Right with You,” from Animalities:

I flipped a coin into
a soda bottle and
wanted to believe in

something I had yet to 
discover. Like when one
of my pills rolls across

the kitchen floor. You'd think 
there was a great order
underlying all things.

About the Author


  • "Highly dynamic, irreverent, subversive, and driven by a kinetic music that often breaks into riot, The Nervous Filaments is equal parts burning car and predatory rain, an unstable, hugely intelligent electrical box that bleeds." —Nick Sturm, The Laurel Review
  • "This collection reads very much like a memory of some long forgotten, nonexistent place that we so desperately want to (re)discover. It is a melancholic remembering, an evolutionary ache, that unexplainable and universal feeling we wake up with each morning" —Kay Cosgrove, Gulf Coast
  • "Obsessively, elegantly, poignantly, David Dodd Lee immerses himself in the mysterious intercourse of self and place." —Franz Wright
  • “Once in a while, a book of poems is so unmemorable that I forget it’s in my hands; once in a longer while, a book will stick in me like a spear. A grievous and gorgeous tour of things-have-gone-to-pieces-since-you-left-me America, David Dodd Lee’s The Nervous Filaments is most certainly of the latter class. There is no sleep so deep I would not hear it there.” —Graham Foust
  • “The charismatic musicality of Lee’s poetic ear accompanies me as I delve into the unnatural, the confusing, and the difficult to parse. The surreal and the subversive survive in an appetizing proposal structured by a dynamic melodiousness. I’m constantly struck by the desire to hear a line again and again.” Read the full review.
  • "In David Dodd Lee's ninth collection of poetry, Animalities, the reader is asked to consider both the artificial and organic worlds that we inhabit as humans and how it might be that we find freedom of thought, time, and space somewhere in between. Using images of both the mundane, the natural, and at times, the supernatural, the poems in this collection ask us to pause and consider what it is that we are experiencing in moments and how we make sense of it all." Read the full review by Laura Marciano in The Ocean State Review, Volume 5, No.1.

Also by David Dodd Lee

The Nervous Filaments

Arrow Pointing North

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