“It is this poet’s calling to hold kindness and its opposite in tension.
What is that opposite? The poems in this volume offer unsettling answers.
With Gretchen Primack’s poems, the absence of kindness causes a quaking in
our bodies. A lyrical language of the present tense evokes a fierce and
tender impatience with what should never have been settled for.”
—Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat
“If it is true that one knows oneself best by observing how one treats
others then this book of poems by Gretchen Primack is essential reading.
Read these poems for the truth they tell about our relationship to and
treatment of the creatures we take to be our property; read this book and
ponder its many questions, for example ‘Who are the beasts?’ and ‘What can I
do?’”
—Kazim Ali, author of The Voice of Sheila Chandra
“How often does one get starstruck by a poet? When I read Gretchen Primack’s
animal poems, I was starstruck instantly. How could someone crystallize my
own feelings about animals and humanity so beautifully, so powerfully, and
so poignantly? Primack seems only capable of writing poetry so damn good
that you will find yourself wanting to read it aloud to everyone you know
who shares your compassion for animals…and to everyone you know who
doesn’t.”
—Marisa Miller Wolfson, filmmaker of Vegucated
“Kind—an unassuming, everyday word, a word sprung from the Old English kin,
meaning family—stitches this book together because each poem herein is an
aching missive written to animals, poems of love and protest that refuse to
bow down to our order of what is worthy and what is less than, to separate
what is ‘born for love or commerce,’ to set apart what is human versus not.
Each poem dissolves and reshapes these divisions with inexhaustible empathy
and a ferocious determination that pleads— yea, even demands—kindness for
all living beings.”
—Nickole Brown, author of To Those Who Were Our First Gods
“Gretchen Primack knows that animals ‘cannot forget hell for even a day, and
so [she] cannot either.’ She is infused with an abnormal amount of empathy,
which fills her heart with kindness, awe, and hope. She wants to live
‘somewhere else, somewhere kind,’ so she spends her time shifting into that
place where every being matters, and she takes us with her.”
—Sharon Gannon, author of Magic is a Shift in Perception
Gretchen Primack is the author of two other collections, Visiting Days (Willow Books Editors Select Series 2019), set in a maximum-security men’s prison, and Doris’ Red Spaces (Mayapple Press 2014), as well as an earlier version of Kind (Post Traumatic Press 2012). She also co-wrote, with Jenny Brown, The Lucky Ones: My Passionate Fight for Farm Animals (Penguin Avery 2013). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, The Massachusetts Review, The Antioch Review, and other journals and anthologies. Primack has administrated and taught with college programs and poetry workshops in prison for many years, and she moonlights at an indie bookstore in Woodstock, NY. Reach out to her at www.gretchenprimack.com.
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