Zoo Nation

By Rae Stoltenkamp and Bev Cross

A collaborative collection of poetry written in the voices of animals who wish to be heard. Thank you for supporting Cat-Ching, Sheffield and Ebony Horse Club, Brixton respectively.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RaedeneWrites
• Release date: Aug 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393359562

Rae Stoltenkamp

Rae Stoltenkamp was born in South Africa and came to England in 1987 to visit family. She stayed on as an alien and was eventually granted British citizenship because she pledged to teach English to inner city school children. When she’s not writing poetry she writes short stories, novellas and novels. Her dearest hope is to make enough money from her writing so one day she can own a very large dog which takes her for walks, keep a villa in Italy and own more shoes than she can count.

Book preview

Zoo Nation

A collection of animal poetry

Bev Cross & Rae Stoltenkamp

Cover image by Sonia Hill

RaedeneWrites

Copyright © 2020 Bev Cross & Rae Stoltenkamp

All rights reserved.

HOW DID ALL THIS HAPPEN?

The idea for the collection came about when Bev and Rae were having a get together at one of their favourite writing retreats (the location is highly secret but the words ‘near Brighton’ have been bandied about). They were discussing what each was doing at that time and Bev’s writing group had been given an exercise to write a poem in the voice of an animal.

Now a little aside here folks. Rae had been trying to get Bev to do a joint project with her for years. She’d always thought it would involve a collection of short stories. The universe had other ideas.

Back to the important stuff – Rae loved the poem Bev read out and resolved to write something similar. The end result was a flurry