An Unorthodox Guide to Wildlife

By Katie Vautour

Katie Vatour’s extraordinary debut collection is an eclectic examination of the space where humans and animals meet, where migratory patterns encounter commercial flights, and birds appear as fishermen, security guards, and street performers. There are riffs on the chameleon and lyrebird, odes to buffalo and shark. With poems that are at once intuitive yet idiosyncratic, visceral yet cerebral, and that flourish an unconventional sense of effortless motion, An Unorthodox Guide to Wildlife considers how animals exist in our lives and imaginations: as autonomous beings, as mimics and metaphors of our own lives, and as bellwethers of environmental damage. At times humourous, tragic, or both, these poems tell the story of natural existence in a sometimes unnatural world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Breakwater Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781550817690

Katie Vautour

Katie Vautour is a visual artist and writer published in a variety of literary journals, and though she dabbles in all genres (including fiction, non-fiction, and playwriting), her main focus is poetry. She is also the director of the Piper’s Frith Writing Retreat. Katie graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University with majors in Filmmaking, Painting, Drawing and Art History. She has participated in residencies in Oaxaca, Mexico, New Brunswick, and the Banff Centre. She exhibits her mixed-media work, paintings, and drawings throughout Atlantic Canada, and gladly repurposes offered used materials into art. She lives in St. John’s.

Book preview

BIRD AIRCRAFT STRIKE HAZARD (B.A.S.H.)

Finding himself able,

the cranking Icarus

honks south.

Made of lift and movement,

he disregards conditions,

intersecting the path

of flight AC 667

to Toronto.

He meets the turbine

head-on in

the tug

of air

that won’t let go,

pounds and pounds

of pressure

collapsing breath

as he whips up

into the engine.

Hot steel snaps

tendons,

scorches feathers,

melts hollow shafts.

Somewhere under all this,

wrenching bones.

Metal and wire wings depart

skyward as

the bird is cast

back to land.

Moulting liquid light, sun-

burnt fragments

of desire—

the deep

plunge

bringing him

down.

THE OSTRICH

bats

a long-lashed eye.

Hoping for some lift,

puffing

plumage,

she takes off

sprinting.

Her reverse-pedalling

legs go about this

the wrong way—

tripping,

she stops

in her flight.

The ostrich bends

over

backwards,

fixing fly-aways,

ruffling her feather-

duster skirt,

her maid’s outfit. Her make-up,

really, is avian, but inside

her head is nothing but bald

lies.

She’s an old