"Nothing lives in us//but hunger." In the arresting and dazzlingly original poems of Sin, Mongrel, Clarie Hero investigates the mongrel of our selves: that mix of the urge for domesticity and peace and of the often more overwhelming urge toward a restless hunger for power-erotic, political, both. Hero asks what to make of the personal and public ramifications of desire, personified here as crackbone, who rides while "The entrails of the west stink in his tracks". What can we salvage, if indeed we still can? In gorgeous language, delicately balancing ferocity and restraint, Hero's poems announce a vision to be reckoned with. Sing, Mongrel is an amazing and important book.-Carl PhillipsThe beautiful and private language in Claire Hero's Sing, Mongrel is a sickly-sweet counter-music to her brutal critique of the political, economic, and aesthetic terms under which we encounter the space of the animal body. Relentlessly dissecting that terrible anatomy with a butcher's eye to reveal all that we would rather not admit about ourselves, this is poetry with gutsy ethos-unafraid of the repercussions of entering into the dark human drive to manage, resource, redefine, exchange, slaughter, or domesticate nature.-Richard Greenfield Read Less