Sing, Mongrel

‘Nothing lives in us//but hunger.’ In the arresting and dazzlingly original poems of Sing, Mongrel, Claire Hero investigates the mongrel of our selves: that mix of the urge for domesticity and peace and of the often more overwhelming urge toward a restless hunger for power–erotic, political, both. Hero asks what to make of the personal and public ramifications of desire, personified here as crackbone, who rides while ‘the entrails of the est stink in his tracks.’ What can we salvage, if indeed we still can? In gorgeous language, delicately balancing ferocity and restraint, Hero’s poems announce a vision to be reckoned with. Sing, Mongrel is an amazing and important book.