In Full-Time Mammal, perception becomes both subject and site of excavation. Rennie Ament wrestles with what it means to be awake and aware in a disorienting world. How are you supposed to know what you don’t know? As ancient defense mechanisms fail, the brain must be retrained, and poetry becomes a divination tool, a game, a portal, a potential weapon, a way through fog.
Survival requires becoming a poet-cum-scientist. Drool becomes data. Ants carry thoughts to rot beneath earth. Animals, plants, and objects are not symbols but companionate presences. This collection feels its way through the failure of imagination at the heart of preordained systems, turning to the natural world not for refuge, but reinvention.
“Ament’s poetry reveals what pulses under our certainties—the voice is plain and fancy, the address full of yearning yet powerfully okay with what is, right here (lemon, penny, baby, cat) with one eye ever on what is intolerable and adjacent (cruelty, death, void, denial). This work is deeply rooted in careful moral thinking and ontological query, but grows wild, needing no distancing language to scaffold meaning. These poems skillfully stack and slide the most pressing questions (without answers), fragments stand as statements, and plain statements of self split off into parts. What is known finds its edges against some wise unknown that Ament has invented, spinning it for us. Reading Full-Time Mammal, I feel, impossibly, in the company of Rumi, Ikkyū, Andrea Gibson, Alice Notley, and Fanny Howe—for here is a poet continuing their holy quest(s): to find significance and connection in the smallest piece of shattered, scattered subjectivity, to hold it out to a reader of this moment, which is forever, in Ament’s hand. I feel held, and guided, and possessed of what the great mystery poetry reveals. It’s so full of the surprises of being alive!”—Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize
“To all full-time mammals who can read this blurb, Rennie Ament has created a masterpiece out of studying the crawling and walking world. ‘First, / in order to live, I had to divide / and divide.’ This book is a brilliant collection of poems that addresses the critical questions of how and why we are busy being alive.”—CAConrad, author, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
