The Uncollected Animals: Poems for Our Nonhuman Kin

Leading poet and activist John Kinsella brings together a
major international collection of contemporary and historical poetry that speaks
to the rights and welfare of animals.

The Uncollected Animals is a unique anthology of poetry
based around all non-human animal life, with the welfare and rights of animals
at the forefront. The anthology includes over forty commissioned poems, and
other poems provided by poets specifically for the anthology. These are set
against an historical context of animal-referencing poems that range in time
from ancient Greece to the 21st century. Kinsella’s introduction offers
insights into the eternal relationship of poetry to animals, and the creative
arrangement of the poems yields startling contrasts and alliances that will
draw readers into a powerful relationship with the work.

The book includes 160 poems representing some sixteen
countries and many different cultures. Together, this collective utterance
respects and conserves a great variety of perspectives. Writing in a full range
of styles, the diverse voices found inside include poets from Aristophanes,
Blake, Coleridge, Du Fu, Melville, and Wordsworth to Anne Carson, CA Conrad,
Kimiko Hahn, Paul Laurence Dunbar, D.H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, Rita
Dove, and Marianne Moore, to important young voices, to performer/lyricists
such as Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. At all times, animals, their rights, and
their welfare are at the fore, be they invertebrates, bird, mammal, reptile,
amphibian, or fish.

In a time of human-induced mass extinctions and rapid
human-induced climate change, this subject could not be more vital and
necessary for all of us to consider, embrace, and act on with empathy.

John Kinsella’s most recent volumes of poetry include Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems 1980-2015 (Picador, 2016), Firebreaks (W.W. Norton, 2016), and Insomnia (W.W. Norton, 2020). His recent poetry book with Kwame Dawes is UnHistory (Peepal Tree, 2022). The first two volumes of his collected poems have appeared in Australia (2022 and 2023) with the third appearing in 2025. In 2025 W.W. Norton will publish a new selected poems with an introduction by Marjorie Perloff, and a new collection, Aporia, will appear from Turtle Point Press. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, an Affiliated Scholar with Kenyon College, and Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University, Western Australia.