Hackable Animal - by Ian Ramsey (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Traveling from the Peruvian Amazon to Beijing, from the Siberian tundra to Oaxacan villages, Ian Ramsey's Hackable Animal explores the metaphysical dimensions of being human amongst the disruptions of the 21st century. This profound collection reads like a scouting report from across the planet, where polar bears, reggaeton, and woolly mammoths collide with cloud computing and wildfires, where assumptions and alignments are turned upside down until we finally emerge, ready to "rummage a new credo."

These fierce poems, grounded in ecology, deep time, and paleolithic heritage, lean into the "strafing ultimatums" of rapidly changing climate, globalization, and technology, asking how we might "chase beauty in the newsfeed of tragedy" and reimagine our relationship to the Earth.

Review Quotes

"Hackable Animal offers a cry for help for a world under assault by environmental destruction and tech over-reliance. But this collection is also a call to arms. Hackable Animal is stunning in idea and execution. This is a one-of-a-kind collection for here and now. Ian Ramsey has created something beautiful.

--Sean Prentiss, author of Finding Abbey, winner of the National Outdoor Book Award

"These poems, compounded of humor and agony, awareness and disgust, awe and regret, take the fervent temperature of an overrun, going-fast, gizmo-ruined planet. The spirit that moves here is urgent for very good reasons that veer far beyond the latest eco-alarms. Ian Ramsey has done what poets traditionally have done-taken the grit and dirt into his mouth and spewed out poems that can reach the vast distances inside human beings. It's inspiring to meet an un-self-justifying poet who meets the exponential, ravening emptiness full-on in cascades and files of words that are terribly honest about the earth-hurt any sentient soul now feels."

-Baron Wormser, author Legends of the Slow Explosion

"Ramsey guides his readers into an unnerving vision of our global moment. Many of these poems can be painful to read; Yet Hackable Animal won't let us accept doom as the answer. Again and again, Ramsey reminds us that this imperfect world is still an open door, a portal into spirit and nature, into self and community. In poem after poem, he flies us through terror and dismay, but he never submits to them. Instead, he gives us the gift that he gives to himself, in his paean to Edward Abbey: 'What hope he held for his charred soul. What hope I hold for mine.'"

--Dawn Potter, author of Accidental Hymn

"Reading Ian Ramsey's intelligent poems about the elemental concern of environmental disaster, climate change, and the role human beings have as stewards of the natural world is to encounter a startling beauty that emerges from the anxiety of experience, even a yearning for innocence. Like his poetic ancestor, William Blake, Ramsey, too, never loses heart. But, these are genuinely American poems. They are breezy and lucid. They come out of the vernacular of everyday life. They are inventive and vigorous. What's more, Ramsey's moral imagination is always tethered to his true poetic gift."

-- David Biespiel, author of Republic Cafe