HUMANIMUS, David Huebert

David Huebert

Finalist 2021 J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award

Poetry
ISBN-13: 978-1-989287569
$18.95 CDN / $17.95 US | Trade Paperback
September 2020

David Huebert’s Humanimus presents a world of soiled nature, of compromised ecology, of toxic transcendence. Raising environmental precarity to the level of mythos, this book implicates readers in what Dominic Pettman calls the “humanimalchine,” where modern cyborg bodies are rewired and remixed with mechanical membranes and animal prostheses. Revelling in corporeal excess and industrial abjection, Humanimus fans the ash of the human experiment to see what strange beauty might wilt and whimper there.

Praise for Humanimus

Huebert’s Humanimus conjures a farmyard of earthly debauchery, siding with the misused and woebegone animals humans seem to need to debase and consume. No quiet Canadian nature poetry here: Huebert steeps the “sphincteral” “demon fluid” of language’s baroque appetites into a “blubber-milk” “bite song” to frenzy between our dream-teeth. Poetic forms that favour repetition and transmutation of word and line structure act as sturdy racks for these sensational forays into the wild in us.—Margaret Christakos

[The poems in We Are No Longer the Smart Kids in Class] have the keys to the zoo, and they’re ready to let the wild rumpus start.—Geoffrey Morrison, The Rusty Toque

Praise for David Huebert

Sampling from two historical sources, “Colloquium: J.T. Henry and Lady Simcoe on Early Ontario Petrocolonialism” comments on colonial encounters in eighteenth-century Ontario. Commentary on contemporary life emerges from the removal and disfigurement of primary sources, putting avarice and empire on display.—Hoa Nguyen, The Walrus Poetry Prize Citation