Illuminated Creatures - (New Women's Voices) by Angela Sucich (Paperback)

About the Book

A poetry book and modern bestiary that explores human experiences through the frame of animal lore, interrogating the dubious stories that brought the creatures to life in old manuscripts. 

Book Synopsis

"We keep our animals locked / in pages." Through Illuminated Creatures, the award-winning chapbook and modern interpretation of a medieval bestiary, Angela Sucich explores personal and human experiences using the frame of animal lore, taking inspiration from but also interrogating the dubious stories and illustrations that brought the creatures to life in old manuscripts. Poems play with the structures and constraints of poetic forms, especially syllabic verse, as well as more thematic boundaries and the questions they raise. What is in our nature and what can change? Who do our bodies belong to? What is on the other side of loss? What stories are our lives telling us, and how do we write new ones? Especially when "[a] myth is a danger, too, kept warm and intact by the telling." Winner of the 2022 New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition. Finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Poetry Prize and the 2022 Cutbank Chapbook Contest.

Review Quotes

"Write a new mythology," says Angela Sucich, and her halcyon book is humming, full of self-made, remade myths, full of animals and beasts which often gleam, worlds in which "a silver lining/ flashes like a minnow pinned."

-Tess Taylor, author of Rift Zone, Last West, and Work & Days

The poems in Angela Sucich's Illuminated Creatures investigate not only our animal impulses, but also an impulse to the animal, to sheltering oneself in hole or cave, to making a home of twigs, straw, and myth. The poems chart a course from past to present, from infancy to death, lighting a path through dark woods into a new lore, a world in which "the birds / will call us kind."

-Bill Carty, author of Huge Cloudy and We Sailed on the Lake

Wonderfully vivid in its imagery and delight with language, and also learned in the best sense, Angela Sucich's Illuminated Creatures enlightens us in its contemporary enactment of a medieval bestiary. Its animal and avian characters, who possess wonderful names derived from fable-basilisk, caladrius, halcyon, hydrus-frolic, fly and slither across these metaphorically illuminated pages. Per Aristotelian classical principles of cosmic order as preserved in the medieval quadrivium, the sections of this book are organized according to the four elements of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. And, as in medieval allegories, all of this form and fabula serve as ground for the poet to discover "poetry in the lies / of old stories," and to trace a pilgrim's progress through her life as woman, artist, daughter, wife and mother. Like the eyes of her illuminated creatures, the poet's vision "reflect[s] / the light, lanterns to read by." In this, her first collection, Angela Sucich finds freedom within the structural constraints of pantoums, syllabics, triolets, and other poetic forms. Brava to this New Woman's Voice! This is a powerful and resonant debut.

-Carolyne Wright, author of Masquerade and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems

(both from Lost Horse Press)