Sing, Mongrel

Sing, Mongrel, Claire Hero’s first full-length collection, proposes a central conceit where the born and the made merge to make a disturbing and lovely hybrid music.

Sing, Mongrel, Claire Hero’s first full-length collection, proposes a central conceit where the born and the made merge to make a disturbing and lovely hybrid music.

The book is divided into four sections: the untitled first; “Come, Salvage,” a longer work; a series of shorter poems called “The Animal Experiments”; and “Post-Domestic,” another collection of shorter poems. Although each section functions powerfully on its own, as the book progresses it gathers an accumulated weight as certain fundamental preoccupations are articulated: the body as it is made (both through nature and through machinery) and the voice that pain and desire gives it.

Hero lays out this dynamic in the opening poem, “In Which She Is Because of a Horse,” and grounds it firmly in gender. The poem begins “Out of the stall, a foaling, what seems a beginning. A stirring / in her womb that is an engine,” raises the question “The bag between her legs: plastic or membrane?” and builds to a crescendo where the “she” has desires that let “fall many foals.”

The book takes us both to interior space – “the small globe of the skull” where “it snows & snows / & cries” (“The Animal Experiments”) – as well as the larger world where “I am in the stitching room and I am in the stable. / At some point, I may need to make a choice” (“A Landskip”).

In the liminal moment before choice is made, Hero asks us, “Why look for an ending?” Instead of an answer, she invites us inside where her directive “Sing, mongrel, sing” is both tender and stern, and seems as much directed at herself as at another or at us.