At turns humorous and heartbreaking, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named explores in both formal and free verse what it means to die, which is to say, also, what it means to live. In this collection, Sealey displays an exquisite sense of the lyric, as well as an acute political awareness. Never heavy-handed or dogmatic, the poems included in this slim volume excavate the shadows of both personal and collective memory and are, at all points, relentless. To quote the poet herself, here is a debut as luminous and unforgiving “as the unsparing light at tunnel’s end.”

You can purchase the collection directly from Northwestern University Press HERE.

Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow as well as the recipient of a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. Her other honors include the 2014 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a 2013 Daniel Varoujan Award and the 2012 Poetry International Prize. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2011, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Third Coast, and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the Programs Director at Cave Canem Foundation.

Praise for The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named

“… this is a collection that reveals what I consider to be the true power of poetry—that a poem is a code, a rogue computer virus, a simulacrum all at once, and that it performs a gentle act of revolution not only against singular meaning, but against the reader’s and even the poet’s attempts to control and deploy it in singular ways.” —Chris Abani