ashrocketship's review
4.0
I'm not really a poetry person - though ironically I've had more poetry published than fiction - but I have inexplicably resolved to stop making fun of it in 2020, so I got started with this collection because I love mastodons - though am partial to mammoths because of a trip to the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, South Dakota in 2015 that I recommend to absolutely everyone because it's spectacular and emotional and life-changing if you care about long dead things - and because Hemet, California is absolutely one of the worst places I've ever been in my life and thus inexplicably magnetic to me. I'm rambling because I don't know how to talk about poetry, honestly. This felt alive and not like a waste of time and I'm glad I threw the cash at rattle to get my hands on it. My favorites were "Among the Bones" and "Catalogue of Damages" and "How to Care for Yesterday's Camel" and the line "One day, even humans will be reassembled / wrong. If we are lucky, they will make us taller, kinder than we ever were." will stay with me for a long time.
ashlurtis's review
3.0
I love all the different connections these poems make within themselves and with each other. Some of felt like too much for me, maybe especially in relation to some of the others. I resonated with the parts of these pieces that talk about ancestry. Overall this collection didn’t blow me away, but there were individual bits I liked a lot!
howifeelaboutbooks's review
5.0
I never thought science and poetry would mix so well! I loved Olson’s Terminal Human Velocity and wasn’t sure how poems framed by paleontology would work, but her style shines through and makes these poems hit hard.
ruthbrarian's review
5.0
Picked this up on a whim in a bookstore because I loved the cover and the couple of poems I skimmed seemed interesting. An enjoyable range of poetry, very much in my wheelhouse... and several about one's father aging and dying, which really fit with what I needed this year.
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