Mister Toebones

The award-winning poet considers the shared habitat and intertwined fates of man and animal. Brooks Haxton has been writing for years about the connections between human beings and the creatures we find fascinating. Mister Toebones, his tenth collection, draws its title from a nickname Haxton gives to a daddy longlegs he sees at his father's grave. In other poems, the poet and his mother, in search of a swimming hole, find a copperhead rearing to strike, about to birth its live young; a poacher in Australia tries to untangle a platypus from a fishing net, only to be injected with venom from the spur on its hind leg. The poems explore rivers, oceans, and the frozen north, and outer space, where they encounter temperature and energies past endurance. Others venture into history among visionaries and despots, scientific prodigies, murderers, lovers. In response to the threats against human survival, our own recklessness chief among them, these poems seek a renewed vitality in attention to all and concern for being--