Rennie Ament, Full-Time Mammal

 

Porcupine

I’m vulnerable with animals.
They are an interpersonal event.
When I offer the trundling rodent
a pocked crabapple
he gives me brain in the eyes.
Density of language
here would be a cloud of mosquitoes.
Wipe off the smear of language on the already.
What exists does not need a cowboy hat.
The slow unfolding of a thought does not sing true.
Blah blah blah blah blah
is what the porcupine takes off my hands.
O my little fleshy mace.
The porcupine turned its ass to me,
which meant it was time to chuck
archaic modes of processing.

The second full-length collection by Owls Head, Maine poet Rennie Ament, following Mechanical Bull (Cleveland OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2023) [see my review of such here] is the absolutely sleek, sharp and whip-smart book-length suite, Full-Time Mammal (Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press, 2026). Composed as an assemblage of first-person stray thoughts, the rich interiority of the short poems across Full-Time Mammal manages to contain both her animal impulses and pure thinking through compact lyric. To say these poems are odd, even quirky, would be an imperfect description, as her poems are composed in straight lines, albeit with the wild heat from her lines providing a kind of abstract shimmer across these long, lyric highways. “Once, unemployment left the fluffy / corpses of days at my door,” she writes, as part of “Now,” but nothing / killed me. Nice try, brain.”

There are poems composed while in motion, and, as with Ament, poems composed while standing completely still, as though her poems present a pause, and requiring the full attention of both author and reader. “So I can / go to work. Work for / peanuts. Get worked up. Work / on myself.” she writes, as part of the poem “Faster, Blood!” “The good work / is a work in progress.”

There’s an element of her expositional lyric, her thinking and examination, that suggest these are poems composed in real time, even as you might be reading them; lyrics held fast and almost disorienting, offering lines composed in fluid but held in ice. “Turn on the day: / dead vole in the grass / with blood on its rump.” begins the short poem “Impossible Task,” “Ban prepositions: they force / the interrelatedness of things.” Her declarative accumulations and modes of compositional thinking, her riffs and responses, offer such an abstract sheen of concrete truths, composed as short, self-contained musings, each of which offer a new beginning into an entirely different direction. “I’ll try to be a good baby / for poetry and brim,” she writes, to open the poem “Potatoes,” “with innocent questions / about potatoes. / Why are they humble?” Or, as the short poem “Tomaž Šalamun” ends:

Get over here, mouse.
Jump over my head.
Animals, animals
all thinking, too.
Comma, comma.
Sentence, sentence.
We take a long time to learn
to live with life.