In this groundbreaking collection of sign language gloss poetry, the first of its kind to be published, Raymond Luczak explores the dynamics of written English poetry and ASL gloss by communing with the animals living in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Having lost much of his hearing at the age of nine months, Luczak was not allowed to use sign language until he was 14 years old, when he demanded to learn it. In the mining town of Ironwood, Michigan, Luczak felt isolated among his hearing peers at school and his family members at the dinner table. More at home in the woods, he discovered a place both wild and welcoming, with no need to guess at meaning through lipreading. Sensing a kinship with the array of animals there, he believed they understood him in ways the hearing world could not. Knowing Deaf people had historically and wrongly been outcast as languageless and wild, Luczak reclaims the woods as a source for his own natural language and sense of belonging.
As a Deaf writer giving English poetry readings in American Sign Language (ASL), Luczak faced the challenge of performing his work in ASL, so he developed his own system of notating ASL gloss on the page. It is this deeply personal, interior language that Luczak uses to animate this moving collection, making his poems legible — knowable, accessible — across communities too often separated by a lack of knowledge.
Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of over 30 books, including the poetry collections Chlorophyll, Lunafly, and Far from Atlantis; once upon a twin was selected as a Top Ten U.P. Notable Book of the Year for 2021. His prose titles include A Quiet Foghorn: More Notes from a Deaf Gay Life and the award-winning Deaf gay novel Men with Their Hands. His most recent anthologies as editor are Yooper Poetry: On Experiencing Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Oh Yeah: A Bear Poetry Anthology. A proud Yooper native and an inaugural Zoeglossia Poetry Fellow, he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
"The poems in this stunning collection are both playful and provocative, vulnerable and intimate. Via delicious imagery, Luczak maintains a primal curiosity and gentleness of spirit despite his heart-wrenching awareness of human ignorance and cruelty. His reverence for the natural world is palpable. In the book's closing poem 'Wild Animals, Again,' the poet prophesizes, 'animals will outlive us when we find ourselves unable to speak the language of connection.' This gorgeous collection is a testament to the power of poetry, transcending barriers and fostering understanding between worlds. I will return to Luczak's poems again and again with a sense of wonderment." - Ellen Lord
"In one of many astute insights into the creaturely world in this magnificent book, Raymond Luczak tells us that animals' stories 'about us are their most powerful tool for survival.' But these poems are also reminders that stories about them can help save us. Luczak give us two distinct languages — a beautifully attentive written English and a dynamic, inventive American Sign gloss. His added genius, though, is to evoke vastly more — the individual languages of any signer's specific hands and face and body, of course, as well as the infinite languages of creation, through which every living being, including each of us, contributes to nature's conversation." - Jonathan Johnson
"Animals Out-There W-i-l-d: A Bestiary in English and ASL Gloss is a magical book that works its spells in musical silence. The work recalls Beethoven's The Creatures of Prometheus. The book is more than a pas de deux between Art and Life, but a beautiful ballet between the creative properties of related languages. Luczak endows the creatures of his bestiary — from tardigrade to bear to dancing firefly — with a new life in the reader's imagination: where ASL gesture and English speech combine in vital new forms, both familiar and strange." - Eric Thomas Norris
"Raymond Luczak's ANIMALS OUT-THERE W-I-L-D: A BESTIARY IN ENGLISH AND ASL GLOSS is a feat of leaping language, a delightful and surprising conversation between English and the American Sign Language gloss that Luczak has created in performing his own poetry. These poems invite us to inhabit their bodies and to examine all the contours of possibility within each line (as well as its counterpart), to attend to noticing the more-than-human world, 'a choir that has / nothing to do with us / humans.'" - Ching-In Chien
