"We keep our animals locked / in pages." Through
Illuminated Creatures
, the award-winning chapbook and modern interpretation of a medieval bestiary, Angela Sucich explores personal and human experiences using the frame of animal lore, taking inspiration from but also interrogating the dubious stories and illustrations that brought the creatures to life in old manuscripts. Poems play with the structures and constraints of poetic forms, especially syllabic verse, as well as more thematic boundaries and the questions they raise. What is in our nature and what can change? Who do our bodies belong to? What is on the other side of loss? What stories are our lives telling us, and how do we write new ones? Especially when "[a] myth is a danger, too, kept warm and intact by the telling." Winner of the 2022 New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition. Finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Poetry Prize and the 2022 Cutbank Chapbook Contest.