Sad Animal

Joshua McKinney’s Sad Animal is the first winner of the John Ridland Poetry Prize.

“Joshua McKinney is a visionary of the intervals and of the interstices. His eye magnifies those last, fleeting splendors of our perishing earth and perishing republic with genuine love and with the grace notes of regret. In Sad Animal, clarity becomes consolation and candor a true companionship. I’m not quite sure that we deserve these beautiful poems, but I am infinitely grateful for them.”

—Donald Revell, author of White Campion and Canandaigua

“A citizen of our perplexed world and its ‘brightest dark revelation,’ Joshua McKinney opens to all that he encounters—whether grief, environmental devastation, love, or even the absurdity of a faculty meeting—with a steadfast attention leavened with humor and, yes, sometimes irreverence.”

 —Elizabeth Robinson, author of Excursive and Thirst & Surfeit

“Talking is what the human does, but all of nature must be part of our conversation, and it is very much our turn to listen, even to the corpse flower, even to the white silence drifting to the eaves of houses. Even as the human is the saddest of animals, we are, as is this book, capable of hope and laughter and pleasure in this world. In fact, a lesson of this book is that it is our duty to feel pleasure, hopeful and devoured.” 

­—Bin Ramke, author of Light Wind Light Light and
     Earth on Earth

“‘Emphatic / breathing in all sound makes / a vatic wail.’ Channeling Gerard Manley Hopkins, McKinney turns the agonistic questions of faith from the inside to the outside: devotions in the day, the small graces of sunlight, ‘shook foil,’ on not only the texture of the landscape, but the hide of memory. ‘The shadow casts the man.’ Yet attention matters, makes things prayer. Ekphrastic, intertextual, formally precise, McKinney’s Sad Animal finds its deep measure in the imbricated organ of our times, ‘where plume-sheen / dazzles in last light / and my ravening, / parched heart leaps // into the air.’”

—Matthew Cooperman
     author of the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless