Consider the Rooster. By Oliver Baez Bendorf. Nightboat Books, 2024.108 pp. Paper $19.95

Extract

Physically, Oliver Baez Bendorf’s most recent poetry collection, Consider the Rooster, is striking in size, with its large horizontal layout and cover image of a cartoon rooster’s claw improbably reaching across space like a hand. With this gesture of extension, Bendorf invites readers into a space where the page becomes a fertile field, with negative spaces that dramatize the openness and dialogical principles that are at the heart of the collection. In poems that are experimental and queer, posthuman and deeply relational, Consider the Rooster dazzles with an open-hearted affirmation of such vital principles as resilience, transition, and pleasure, despite the stultifying impacts of the pandemic, transphobia, and homophobia, grief, and the political and ecological crises of our time.

Consider the Rooster seems particularly urgent in this cultural moment when the ontological realities of life—namely, the lines of contingency and interconnection that all human animals share with the earth and other animals—are being forgotten or denied. As a trans ecopoet, Bendorf reminds readers that wind is relational, the “breath that has blown through everyone” (12), and that “transition is always a relief” (17).