Natural History: Poems [Paperback]

A unique work of science and poetry, winner of the Cave Canem Prize, selected by Natasha Trethewey

A research biologist most recently at the Museum f?r Naturkunde in Berlin, Brandon Kilbourne illuminates the intersections between science and poetry in poems that demonstrate the wonder, curiosity, and precision required by both disciplines.

Natural Historyopens by confronting the hidden histories within the study of biology and its links to colonialism, including the revelation that European scientists used slave ships to transport specimens from Africa and the Americas back to Europe. Across the collection, Kilbourne describes how these histories of exploitation are still reflected in dioramas of elephants, rhinoceroses, and African people displayed in natural history museums. Other poems narrate the intricate work of studying fossils, and a longer sequence recounts an expedition above the Arctic Circle to recover evidence of how a fishs fins gave rise to the diversity of limbs found among amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.

Natural Historyis a rare and fascinating debut, and Kilbournes exquisite eye brings the role of the working biologist to life.

A unique work of science and poetry, winner of the Cave Canem Prize, selected by Natasha TretheweyBrandon Kilbourne has a PhD in evolutionary biology from the University of Chicago and over twenty years of experience as a research biologist at natural history museums. His poetry has appeared inEcotone,Obsidian,Poet Lore, and elsewhere.

Kilbourne pushes back against . . . the carefully made museum with its curated forgetting, silences, and erasures, even the scientists (then and now) who could never have imagined someone like him turning his early calling not only into scientific study but also into poetry.Natural Historyis a marvel.Natasha Trethewey

Brandon Kilbournes poems move masterfully between the technical and the lyril3¢