Our Own Beautiful Brutality

In poems both brutal and beautiful, Karen Poppy traces the interconnectedness-symbiotic, antagonistic, and metaphorical-of the endangered antelope and human worlds. All the grace and violence of both worlds is here in poems that are moving, necessary, and ultimately life-affirming. I could not put down this powerful book.

-Steve Bellin-Oka, author of Instructions for Seeing a Ghost




Poppy is a poet of the 21st Century. Her pen is compelling, pointing out the crucial need for human, animal, and environmental rights and respect. Her poems inspire transformation.

-Lynne Cox, American long-distance open-water swimmer, New York Times best-selling author, and speaker




This glowing collection of Karen Poppy's verses reads at once as spare and abundant, elegant and generous. Her lines stretch and shrink, experimenting with a wide range of forms, and her best rhymes read like plot twists. our own beautiful brutality asks what all readers and writers ask each other across the resonance of words: "how in sudden shift did I become you?"

-Betsy Cornwell, New York Times best-selling author and founder of The Old Knitting Factory: making space for single moms to make art in a 1906 knitting school in Connemara