Rumored Animals

"Quinn Latimer's poems — distinctive, audacious, elemental, and unyielding — render the world with all its strangenesses intact and vitality restored, asserting the legitimacy of another, more primal vision at odds with the agreed-upon, one where 'mountains/ surround us with their animal/ prowl, throw back// their black capes/ and are done.' This is a thrilling, defiant, and heartening body of work."
—Timothy Donnelly, author of The Cloud Corporation
"Latimer draws on sources from contemporary photography and art … to develop a complex engagement with constructions of self and prevailing cultural determinations of the female and feminine. In rich, robust sounds and rhythms, the poet strives to recognize herself within surface and image, attempts to identify with the object of an outside gaze, figured as the looming presence of a brutally defining camera, and a discomfort at the fraught relation between herself as body and represented sign. Negotiating contradictory urges to conceal and reveal identity, Latimer allows a quiet refusal to come fully into view. This is an impressive debut."
—Publishers Weekly
Quinn Latimer is is a poet and critic. "Rumored Animals" is her first collection and casts a wide lyrical net. Limning and mining a series of evocative, disparate landscapes — the Southern California coast, the high desert of Far West Texas, New York’s brick canyons, and finally the Mittel-European reaches of Germany and Switzerland — Latimer tasks these places with the procedures of the critical mind and the movements of the sensual body. Her contemporary lyric poems move from starkly personal elegies to essayistic examinations of the lives and works of writers and artists including Ingeborg Bachmann, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Robert Walser, Francesca Woodman, and Virginia Woolf. Through both bodies of poems runs the central image of the animal — its idea, its fact — and a fervent, feverish anthropomorphism that at once haunts and illuminates the writing at hand.