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Night Animals
The poems in Night Animals, by Yusef Komunyakaa, climb so deeply into the being of various beasts, from cricket to leopard to snowy owl, that we read them with an uncanny shiver of recognition. Without ever fully abandoning his human skin, Komunyakaa inhabits both the outer and inner lives of these creatures. The images are a brilliant match for the poems, each of Rachel Bliss’s surreal animals populate a realm somewhere between our two species―birds with teeth, men with antlers, a duck wearing suspenders. Both image and word are dense and dark, intensely focused around a kind of hunger. The poet has been startling us with his rich, disturbing, and important poems for many years. Night Animals extends Yusef Komunyakaa’s remarkable oeuvre.
- GenresPoetry
32 pages, Paperback
First published June 2, 2020
2 people are currently reading
117 people want to read
About the author
Yusef Komunyakaa
96 books208 followersYusef Komunyakaa (born April 29, 1947) is an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his enduring contribution to the poetry world.
His subject matter ranges from the black general experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights time period and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War.
(from Wikipedia)
His subject matter ranges from the black general experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights time period and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 8, 2022
We are asked to shapeshift from poem to poem with this poet, viewing with strange eyes and hearing with strange ears, the psychic interiors of night creatures.
Night Animals: Poems by Yusef Komunyakaa was published in 2020 by Sarabande Books, illustrated by surrealist Rachel Bliss, and the cover art, representative of the numerous pieces featured alongside the poems throughout the book, is a good introduction to it.
The night is blue and there is a creature that seems at first like a child’s drawing of an armadillo, but as the eye focuses in on the details of the animal, its head is mouse-like. Wait, no. Perhaps it’s a small dog. Its feet, trotters, now conjuring into the imagination a pig. Its tail, long, winding under and around the body of the creature, framing it, suggesting encirclement, a snakeskin. An ouroboros, perpetually changing form.
Like the cover image, the poems within, when given slow attention, become other, and more, than what they at first seem, both within themselves, and then at the end as a complete work, whereupon we pause, suspecting we may not have seen them clearly, or fully, with the first pass and feel the urge to begin re-reading.
Komunyakaa grew up in a small Louisiana town, served as a correspondent in the Vietnam War, and was awarded the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his work, Neon Vernacular . He is currently 81 years old, teaching at NYU.
There is a short video of the poet by Sampsonia Way Magazine on youtube produced in 2011 called Fearless Laughter. Worth looking up and watching as he talks about the importance of listening to the poem, editing and exiting the poem, and the space for silence within and around the poem.
Night Animals: Poems by Yusef Komunyakaa was published in 2020 by Sarabande Books, illustrated by surrealist Rachel Bliss, and the cover art, representative of the numerous pieces featured alongside the poems throughout the book, is a good introduction to it.
The night is blue and there is a creature that seems at first like a child’s drawing of an armadillo, but as the eye focuses in on the details of the animal, its head is mouse-like. Wait, no. Perhaps it’s a small dog. Its feet, trotters, now conjuring into the imagination a pig. Its tail, long, winding under and around the body of the creature, framing it, suggesting encirclement, a snakeskin. An ouroboros, perpetually changing form.
Like the cover image, the poems within, when given slow attention, become other, and more, than what they at first seem, both within themselves, and then at the end as a complete work, whereupon we pause, suspecting we may not have seen them clearly, or fully, with the first pass and feel the urge to begin re-reading.
Komunyakaa grew up in a small Louisiana town, served as a correspondent in the Vietnam War, and was awarded the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his work, Neon Vernacular . He is currently 81 years old, teaching at NYU.
Now, what I know makes me look down
at the ground. I can almost feel
how the owl’s beauty scared the mice
to death, how the shadow of her wings
was a god passing over the grass.
from ‘Tree Ghost’
Yusef Komunyakaa / Night Animals
There is a short video of the poet by Sampsonia Way Magazine on youtube produced in 2011 called Fearless Laughter. Worth looking up and watching as he talks about the importance of listening to the poem, editing and exiting the poem, and the space for silence within and around the poem.
Come to a piece [of poetry], again and again, not to perfect a voice, but to discover a voice. – Yusef Komunyakaa
September 2, 2024
3 1/2 honestly this was pretty fun! i like the shapeshifting of the poem personas
April 21, 2022
How different are we, really? Do our thumbs somehow make us superior to our four-legged companions? Is our language clearer than a birdsong or the bleating of a goat? Under our cosmetically hairless skin, we are bones, a skeleton constructed in a way that is eerily like that of a primate. We are driven by hunger. We kill to eat, to feed our young. We are animals in cotton sheaths. In this poetry collection by Yusef Komunyakaa, this urge is painted through imagery that, at times, is difficult to distinguish between man and beast. Paired with surreal art by Rachel Bliss, it evokes a self-evaluation: how human am I? And then, the poems force you to come to terms with your answer. This book is a celebration of similarity and a chance to display the beauty of diversity in nature.
Yusef Komunyakaa has won several awards including the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry which centers mainly around contrasting concepts. Born in the south on the cusp of the civil rights movement, his poetry details moments of war and peace, of light and dark. To identify the narratives that he wields in his work as simply “good and bad” would be unjust, distasteful. Night Animals is one of the few poetry collections of his where the central theme is not war, at least not in the way his other books of poetry describe war; however, this book still juggles with contrast, making it a refreshing, but still familiar, read from Komunyakaa.
Like Yusef Komunyakaa, Rachel Bliss creates art that is frightening in the same ways that it is beautiful- it is raw. She has been featured in publications in The New York Times, had her art exhibited in The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and has been exhibited in numerous art galleries across the globe. Her surreal paintings come to life through Komunyakaa’s words, illustrating a hybrid of human and beast that both confronts our identity and rewrites it without asking permission. Dark, deep, and disturbing yet mystical and intriguing.
Within the poems themselves, Yusef Komunyakaa wields concise imagery to pull the reader into the dark, letting us observe things that we otherwise would not see, or choose not to. Poems in this collection detail living things and how they perform in the dark. We see unique animals and their sleeping habits, a mother bear defending her cub, violence, harmony, and a refreshing take on human ignorance that dares examination of the self. The imagery is rich yet blunt, to the point. He does not linger on an image any longer than you’d allow it to hold your attention.
From the moment you open the book, Komunyakaa’s tone is evident. The opening poem, “The Blue Hour,” starts, well, at the beginning, carrying the reader through the process of creation, something that is ultimately too divine for us to comprehend. “They come with uh-huh & yeah,” (Komunyakaa 1) is a line that sets the stage for his portrayal of humans in this book. We are small, smaller than the animals we consider to be beneath us, victims of our own existence. We lack the vocabulary to make sense of creation, of our existence at all. This language appears throughout the poems.
This poetry collection heavily relies on the mysterious, the oddities of our world, to further the idea of unfamiliarity. Poems such as “Several Mysteries of the Platypus,” “Blind Fish,” and “Night of the Armadillo” discuss the anomalies of the platypus, the angler fish, and the armadillo, respectfully. Creation, in Komunyakaa’s perception of it, is cruel, but purposeful. Bizarre animals are criticized directly by means of questioning, a voice employing the “huh” and “yeah” that Komunyakaa introduced as being a human default.
We think we know everything, how it works, how life works. On a logical basis, we do, but Night Animals forces us to think a little harder about why. It is important for us to confront our own imperfections and limitations the same way we tend to critique the evolutionary advantages and disadvantages of other species, since we were made by the same process. We can’t understand it, but we can recognize that we may never understand it and that is enough. I would recommend this collection of poetry to anyone who is fascinated by nature, attracted to the grotesque tendencies of humanity, or just likes rich poetry, tasteful imagery, and a strong voice. Komunyakaa and Bliss work together to make these attributes easily accessible both inside and outside of Night Animals.
Yusef Komunyakaa has won several awards including the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry which centers mainly around contrasting concepts. Born in the south on the cusp of the civil rights movement, his poetry details moments of war and peace, of light and dark. To identify the narratives that he wields in his work as simply “good and bad” would be unjust, distasteful. Night Animals is one of the few poetry collections of his where the central theme is not war, at least not in the way his other books of poetry describe war; however, this book still juggles with contrast, making it a refreshing, but still familiar, read from Komunyakaa.
Like Yusef Komunyakaa, Rachel Bliss creates art that is frightening in the same ways that it is beautiful- it is raw. She has been featured in publications in The New York Times, had her art exhibited in The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and has been exhibited in numerous art galleries across the globe. Her surreal paintings come to life through Komunyakaa’s words, illustrating a hybrid of human and beast that both confronts our identity and rewrites it without asking permission. Dark, deep, and disturbing yet mystical and intriguing.
Within the poems themselves, Yusef Komunyakaa wields concise imagery to pull the reader into the dark, letting us observe things that we otherwise would not see, or choose not to. Poems in this collection detail living things and how they perform in the dark. We see unique animals and their sleeping habits, a mother bear defending her cub, violence, harmony, and a refreshing take on human ignorance that dares examination of the self. The imagery is rich yet blunt, to the point. He does not linger on an image any longer than you’d allow it to hold your attention.
From the moment you open the book, Komunyakaa’s tone is evident. The opening poem, “The Blue Hour,” starts, well, at the beginning, carrying the reader through the process of creation, something that is ultimately too divine for us to comprehend. “They come with uh-huh & yeah,” (Komunyakaa 1) is a line that sets the stage for his portrayal of humans in this book. We are small, smaller than the animals we consider to be beneath us, victims of our own existence. We lack the vocabulary to make sense of creation, of our existence at all. This language appears throughout the poems.
This poetry collection heavily relies on the mysterious, the oddities of our world, to further the idea of unfamiliarity. Poems such as “Several Mysteries of the Platypus,” “Blind Fish,” and “Night of the Armadillo” discuss the anomalies of the platypus, the angler fish, and the armadillo, respectfully. Creation, in Komunyakaa’s perception of it, is cruel, but purposeful. Bizarre animals are criticized directly by means of questioning, a voice employing the “huh” and “yeah” that Komunyakaa introduced as being a human default.
We think we know everything, how it works, how life works. On a logical basis, we do, but Night Animals forces us to think a little harder about why. It is important for us to confront our own imperfections and limitations the same way we tend to critique the evolutionary advantages and disadvantages of other species, since we were made by the same process. We can’t understand it, but we can recognize that we may never understand it and that is enough. I would recommend this collection of poetry to anyone who is fascinated by nature, attracted to the grotesque tendencies of humanity, or just likes rich poetry, tasteful imagery, and a strong voice. Komunyakaa and Bliss work together to make these attributes easily accessible both inside and outside of Night Animals.
December 21, 2020
It's been a while since I've responded so immediately to what Yusef Komunyakaa's writing. His early and mid-career works stand at or near the very top of late 20th century American poetry--Dien Cai Dau, Magic City, "Safe Subjects," it's a long list. More recently, he's focused on drama, adaptations, and some shorter form sequences, all of which I've been happy enough to read, but none of which shook me. Maybe because Night Animals is a dream book, it dives more deeply into the places where image and psychic depths meet. The illustrations (or maybe responses/calls) are off and on for me, but it's excellent Komunyakaa.
February 7, 2021
Small and strange, I loved the imagery and art.
February 23, 2026
(From my 100-word review project) At the core of this slim book is exactly what you’d expect: short, intense poems on eerie nocturnal creatures and cave-dwellers. But as sign-posted by Rachel Bliss’s scrawlingly textured paintings (human eyes in animal faces, rows and rows of small teeth, more than a trace of aboriginal influence), the writing also incorporates creation story and dreamscape, subtle voyeurism and death fixation. These elements are creepily appropriate, though in true Ted Hughes style, Komunyakaa is at his best when sketching in a loose mythology around his animals’ features, eg. of the platypus: “the first chimera / pieced together by a prankish god”.
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August 25, 2020Strange and elegant and sometimes frightful, Yusef Komunyakaa's Night Animals explores the creatures of the darkness, beast and human, good and bad. Some poems track quite closely to real animals; others veer into the fantastical, exploring so much more than the platypus, or the wolf. Rachel Bliss's art can be jarring, but generally works in concert with the occasionally fantastical poetry, offering windows in worlds that may or may quite exist. An elegant collection, to be savored.
April 21, 2024
In this brief poetry collection, Komunyakaa literally describes animals—in a strange, defamiliarizing but beautiful way, of course. And most of the poems are paired with art from Rachel Bliss, whose work tightrope walks between the real and the surreal. I usually read poetry before bed, and this was the perfect collection for that time of day—turning out the light and spotting Komunyakaa’s nocturnal creatures in the shadows.
This review was originally published on my blog.
This review was originally published on my blog.
April 26, 2026
God I love the idea of a book of poems and art.
And I love that cover possum, brilliant in the dark.
Alas, the poems stayed inside with animal and didn't take me far enough beyond the physical. In fact, I felt the poems were trying to explain or give story to the art, instead of letting the art live between the poems.
And I love that cover possum, brilliant in the dark.
Alas, the poems stayed inside with animal and didn't take me far enough beyond the physical. In fact, I felt the poems were trying to explain or give story to the art, instead of letting the art live between the poems.
August 13, 2020
Love some of the poems, moved by some of the poem/painting pairings, but chilled by some images and frustrated by some of the animal depictions (more projection than description though framed as such).
June 25, 2024
in this landscape a pretty horse
translates into a man holding a gun
translates into a man holding a gun
March 11, 2026
"How do you see
into darkness? I wonder if you know
the shape of gone, of never been born."
into darkness? I wonder if you know
the shape of gone, of never been born."
June 14, 2020
A small chapbook of poems of nocturnal beasts of the night accompanied by the equally dark and surreal art of Rachel Bliss. Yusef komunyakaa is one of my favorite contemporary poets since reading his Neon Vernacular, pulling the dark, powerful and profound from the everday.
The Blue Hour
A procession begins in the blue-
black gratitude between worlds,
& the Rebirth Brass Band
marches out of what little light
Is left amoung the magnolia blooms.
Step here, & one steps off
The edge of the world...
The Blue Hour
A procession begins in the blue-
black gratitude between worlds,
& the Rebirth Brass Band
marches out of what little light
Is left amoung the magnolia blooms.
Step here, & one steps off
The edge of the world...
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews