“Juxtaposed against violent images of animals and their deaths,
Gordon Meade’s poems showcase the tortured and unnecessary loss not only of
animal life but of animals’ joy, culture, and beauty too. Read in succession
these poems offer a simple, but scathing account of the numerous ways in
which animals’ bodies, pride, and homes are destroyed by humans’ seemingly
insatiable, varied, and violent means of consuming them. Gordon’s words
strike the tone of sadness we should all be feeling at how much has been
lost and the prevalence of our continued violent relations with animals.
I’ll be churning over these words and images for some time”
—Claudia Hirtenfelder, host of the Animal Turn Podcast.
“With artful simplicity and heartbreaking persistence, the poems in EX-posed
march into our hearts like carpenter ants. Their rhythms lay down a drum
beat that synchronizes with the thud of our heart, the tap of claws on bars,
the drip of blood from a hanging carcass. This is a collection we can
complete in a single reading yet the poems within the covers will stay with
us forever as a reminder of our humanity and the responsibility that brings.
The insistence of each line will beat inside us every time we encounter a
nonhuman species, whether behind a fence, inside a cage or on a plate. These
poems and the difficult truths that the photographs they accompany
illustrate warn us we are animals too and that it’s time to end the
suffering we’re causing our fellow earth-mates.”
—Joanna Lilley, poet & author
“These are words that can unravel you, these are words that can remake you.”
—Dr. Richard Twine (he/him), Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences, Department
of History, Geography and Social Science (HiGSS), Co-Director of Centre for
Human/Animal Studies (CfHAS)
“Having broken new ground in writing about nonhuman animals with Zoospeak’s
formal experiments, Gordon Meade and Jo-Anne McArthur return with a fresh
triumph, EX-posed. Deeply ingrained stereotypes, which imagine living
animals to be nothing more than resources, toys, garbage, or cute ornaments
for ‘our’ world, are the veils we humans draw over who nonhumans really are
and how they actually live and suffer. In collaboration with vivid images
from McArthur’s multi-photographer project, Hidden, Meade’s poems quietly
but relentlessly draw back those veils. Another radical project from a
poetic innovator and an indefatigable photojournalist, EX-posed will warm
your heart and leave you shattered.”
—Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of Listen, we all bleed
“Many of the photographs depict the tragic loss of the animal gaze,
especially when eyes look back at us, but the elegies recuperate creaturely
embodiment even as death lurks in the shadows. Together the images and poems
dramatize that human instrumentalising of animals across national borders,
ecological zones, religions and customs is irredeemable.”
—Wendy Woodward, Professor Emerita, Department of English, University of the
Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa
Gordon Meade is a Scottish poet based in the East Neuk of Fife. He has been the Creative Writing Fellow at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, and the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Dundee, and has read from his work throughout the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, and Luxembourg. He is the author of eleven other collections of poetry, including In Transit (Enthusiastic Press 2022), Zoospeak (Enthusiastic Press 2020), The Year of the Crab (Cultured Llama Publishing 2017), Les Animots: A Human Bestiary (Cultured Llama Publishing 2015), and Sounds of the Real World (Cultured Llama Publishing 2013).
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