In Kind

"Part wunderkammer, part grimoire, Maggie Queeney's In Kind is focused, finally, on survival. A chorus of personae, speaking into and through a variety of poetic forms, guide the reader through the aftermath of generations of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence, before designing a transformation and rebirth. In Kind works in conversation and collaboration with the myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses, where women are often transformed into the non-human after a traumatic encounter. In these poems, women turn into animals, plants, geological formations, ghosts, and other natural phenomena. They flex their new figures and speak. Their stories beg what forms can fit the human survivor dehumanized by violence. The poems in In Kind adopt the survival strategies found in myth, in magic, in the supernatural realm; the natural world, the animal world, and the world of plants; and the material world available. In Kind functions as both mask and mirror, a series of forms (poetic, human, non-human) ask the reader to look into and through the traumatized body. These are poems of witness, self-creation, and reclamation"--