In her new collection, Animal Soul, Mary Carroll-Hackett does not just give us “the colon before the list of truest things.” She begins that list for us, with poems like “Galileo’s Fingers,” “Six Rules For Devils,” and “This Bread, Those Beans.”

Tongue

 

What does the poet know beyond the taste of wheat, glutinous, sticky and unyielding? Pickpocket feline paw clawing the limited poet beyond the Latinate pull of yeast and flour, beyond the grind of corn, the dry sift of what could list upon the tongue, tip, hump and root, that mouth vegetable, that yowling cat, for whom the illusion of language beckons, stretching like the building roof, convincing–tongue, poet and cat alike–that something real can be said, that that arched roof moves us somewhere, somehow closer to god.