Review of Chance Encounters with Wild Animals by Monica Kidd // Margaryta Golovchenko

Chance Encounters with Wild Animals was released by Gaspereau Press in 2019.

In one of the poems from this collection, Monica Kidd tells us: “Everything important has already happened, / what’s left is wasteland: you singing in the show, / a thin frost wrapping everything in sleep.” These lines characterize the tone of the collection, as Kidd works to dispel the idea that we are to expect something from nature. ChanceEncounters with Wild Animals, is a modern travel log reminiscent of those kept by famous historical figures like Darwin and Marco Polo, sharing with us the physical and affective experiences that come with travelling to Antarctica or simply observing life go by “in Neruda’s country, old men gather / like storm clouds, slap each other’s shoulders / over rounds of coffee, laughing loudly.”

Kidd’s poems are fraught with tension between leaving and returning, not merely in a physical sense but also across time to previous forms of knowledge. The result is an attentiveness to the surrounding world that is not so much looking to find beauty and subject for fascination, but asks us to seek out a sense of gratitude and fulfillment in moments we might have begun taking for granted, to make the most of “all / we are allowed to need.”

The result is moments of subtle realization and humorous meditation throughout, like the speaker telling us of how, “[w]ater at my porthole glacial green, / I stumble sideways without spilling / a drop of tea,” leaving us to marvel at a feat that manages to be charming as well as slightly eccentric. There are small delights hidden in the collection that may pass one by if all one expects to find is more poems about the natural world, such as parts “IX” and “XIII” of “Curious.” The ominous subtitle “Skills for a nuclear winter” in these two poems creates an ominousness that never returns in the same form in the collection, a little poetic puzzle thrown in by Kidd that is left up to us to work it into the bigger picture or to bury in the backs of our minds, the way we have with the all warnings for our planet’s future.

What it means to be “animal” acquires new dimensions in Chance Encounters with Wild Animals. Kidd applies the same methods of careful examination and contemplation to people that have conventionally been applied to the study of flora and fauna, until we cannot escape the realization laid out before us: “[t]his stench animal / in the kingdom of newspaper / and marauding cats.” Even the art we produce to capture and understand our relation to the world is uncanny, filled with a desire so pure and overwhelming that we lose the composure, the rational logic that is often described as the thing that separates us from animals. Chance Encounters with Wild Animals encourages us to be more honest with our emotions and dwell more on those unguarded moments like the speaker in “Fugue,”“[t]hat little explosion in me when I realized / Bach and Liszt spoke German;Tchaikovsky, / Russian. That the world stretched past / horizon’s tripwire.”

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