New Book from BA / MFA Alum Nicole Oquendo

Congratulations to BA English and MFA Creative Writing Alum Nicole Oquendo on the release of their book, We, Animals. We, Animals is published by Beating Windward Press, LLC (October 1, 2021; ISBN-13: 978-1940761411).

From the back cover of We, Animals:

A visual poetry collection of nontraditional, multimodal compositions on the subjects of love, desire, pain, pleasure, and gender identity. This book is in no way a guide on how to behave when you're in love, but at the core, these are love poems. Loving freely requires a lack of constraint. We want to be bound, but we want the bindings to be the ones we choose.

“In we animals, Nicole Oquendo doesn't just evoke fur and claw and quickened heart: they inhabit. Here, the deep intimacy built between so-called predator and prey (self and other, self and self) tangles and untangles in an endless knot of relating. Here, a narrative of emergence arcs towards lyrical decomposition. Here, sounds, forms, and images pulse together with blood's electricity. These are words to read aloud, to wrestle with, to be cornered by, to hold.”

~ D. Allen, A Bony Framework for the Tangible Universe (The Operating System, 2019)

“we, animals guides the reader to the terrible beauty and terrifying precipice of myth, folk take, and the narratives of self that we all construct—only to dismantle those ideas, page by page, reconstructing them into something new, something, fierce—something with teeth.”

~ Allie Marini, author of This Apiary, Here Comes Hell, and Southern Cryptozoology: A Field Guide to Beasts of the Southern Wild

Purchase We, Animals at Barnes & Noble or Amazon.

Visit Nicole Oquendo online at nicoleoquendo.com, and follow them on Twitter at @nicoleoq.

composite background created with images by Stux and Geralt, both released under license