The offensive, preventable afflictions that befall animals removed from their
natural settings and relegated to, say, Taronga Park Zoo or Brooklyn Zoo are
a topic too little addressed in society, let alone legitimized within the
often myopic parameters of current aesthetic trends, especially in poetry.
In this regard, Kinsella and Hull do both the issue and poetry itself a
tremendous service. The danger in this volume, though, is that poetry risks
becoming polemic, particularly in what are presumably Hull's contributions
(the poems are unattributed throughout), as the medium is sometimes neglected
in favor of its didactic ends. These "lessons" are, in turn, occasionally
conveyed through intrusive accounts of a speaker's personal reactions.

The appalling facts about human denigration of animals speak for themselves.
The reader learns in "The Zoo Ark" and elsewhere that trees in orang-outang
cages are often hot-wired to prevent the monkeys from climbing. Cheetah cubs
have died from ingesting a chemical found in anti-freeze, and dogs from the
pellets designed to kill snails in flower gardens. Bears become depressed or
aggressive when their unhealthy diet of marshmallows is altered or
interrupted. Only twenty-one percent of pandas born in captivity survive
more than three years, and the thirty-three surviving NASA astro-chimps,
along with their 110 descendants, are suffering from zero gravity associated
trauma--and so on. Likewise, zookeepers quoted here speak for their
ignorant, short-sighted selves, as when two Beluga whales died after being
injected with a medication accidentally tainted by toothpaste and shaving
cream. "I've never lasted long in a relationship with people / who leave the
lids off toothpaste / or squeeze the tube from the wrong end," says an
official at Tank World, "and now I know why."

Because the statistics are so discouraging and the narratives so brutal, the
interjection of editorial determinations or overly emotive responses to such
insensitivity and inanity--no matter how necessary and responsible is outrage
from a humanistic or advocacy perspective--can belabor the poems. The
admirable prescriptive project advanced by Zoo is already contained in its
descriptive acumen, so allusions to "the poor hungry rattle snake" and a
"poor old elephant," and assertions like, "If only you could feel their
misery" and "I was so distraught, I grabbed my own throat," inhibit the
reader's ability to draw her own conclusions from the damning evidence at
hand. Many poems in _Zoo_ enact far more sophisticated antidotes than merely
"[s]creaming rage into currents of hot dry air" as "the tears come salty and
thick," even if their authors are genuinely driven by an empathy with the
animal kingdom. Several poems suggest that this identification with animals'
suffering stems from the authors' personal suffering. This is a justifiable
reason for wishing to protect animals and punish those who proffer harm, but
the two are often sweepingly conflated throughout the volume, creating a
maelstrom of undifferentiated anguish that obscures the relation between
animal rights and human rights the book otherwise works hard to establish,
thus frustrating a reader eager to understand, if not sympathize with,
whomever or whatever feels pain. Fortunately Hull ironizes, in places, how
her emotion can exaggerate progressive politics into the silly idealism of,
for example, lions eating organic tofu curd, and how her anger makes her tell
not show. Eventually she asks, "Could somebody kindly direct me to a solar
system where nothing had to suffer and be killed? Thank you. If there is a
spaceship available, then I'm outa here...."

This planet, though, is not one that "places ethics above lollies," so she
has every right to campaign in the effort to reform it. Likewise, furthering
his anti-pastoralist preoccupations, Kinsella autopsies how zoos' pretext of
education conceals an impulse towards entertainment a la Disneyland or
Hollywood's Jurassic Park, how Noah's model of preservation can be perverted
by a desire for presentation, and how the land itself pays the price for
these grotesqueries. While Hull's portions are generally prose sequences,
Kinsella counterpoints with condensed, linguistically vibrant lyrics and
shards. Several, such as "Small Birds," possess the tenor of quiet praise
characteristic of haiku, while others, like "Lightning: rapture," are as
agitated as the scenes they signify. "And Everyone Gathered In Objection Yet
Again" plies an eerie natural and aesthetic transfiguration, and "Noble
Gestures" sets its informed critique closer to the bone without allowing the
language--any more than the conscience--to lapse, as he condemns

an all-out immutable tendency towards self
and God and ochre and occupation theology:
being I-ness in the living room under the sunlamp
and still looking goddamn white, still killing off
ant trails from the sink, drinking beer
and visiting sacred sites and rolling echidnas
in cars without bullbars. See, in the mix
you're the same as the rednecks.
The zoos are full of you.

The book does not end without interrogating the status of poetry as an
exercise possibly complicit in acts of appropriation and ornament, a question
wisely left open as a kind of cautionary tale. _Zoo_ asks who is the more
animalistic, humans or the other animals, as its authors seek to restore the
unfettered privacy an entire zoo mentality has violated and turned into
spectacle.