Reviewed by: Literature for Nonhumans by Gabriel Gudding Bayard Godsave (bio) Gabriel Gudding. Literature for Nonhumans. Ahsahta Press, 2015. “There can be no pastoral as long as there is a slaughterhouse.” So reads the epigraph to Gabriel Gudding’s collection of prose poems, Literature for Nonhumans, though “prose poems” may not be totally accurate here. Speaking variously the language of manifesto, poststructural critique, taxonomy, and lyric essay, the pieces in this collection defy simple genre distinction—and maybe that’s what makes them prose poems after all. Whatever you call them, though, they become spaces where Gudding is able to write towards a revolutionary poetics, crafting poetry that is grounded in the ethical, an ecocentric writing that seeks to decenter human experience, to challenge the very idea that human should be the lens through which we view the world in the first place. The pastoral has always been an ideological construct, and like any ideological construct it is shot through with blindspots. According to Terry Gifford, in his book-length study Pastoral, an engaged pastoral presents an ambivalent picture of the natural world, one that often tries to cast light on its own ideological blind spots—it recognizes, perhaps, the effect human actions have had on the environment, or acknowledges the complex socio-economic relationships that define the “natural” space the writer is responding to. With his epigraph, and in the poems that follow, Gudding casts a cold light on a major blind spot that, he believes, has for too long marred the work of nature writers and leftist critics alike: animal suffering. Gudding takes as his anti-Arcadia the state of Illinois, whose ecology has in a short time been radically changed by human intervention. Three-quarters of the state was wetlands, he tells us, “prior to European settlement.” Nearly all of that has since been drained to make way for vast stretches of pasture land. “Now excepting a small portion of its 3% of public lands [Illinois] is an open-aired factory that manufactures a stark disavowal of other life.” And it is in this space that the human and “nonhuman animal” collide, as embodied in the repressive apparatus of the slaughterhouse. Gudding presents Illinois as a vast network of exploitation—a place where the land is exploited, where the animals, non-human and human alike, are exploited—and to get at the genesis of this exploitation, often his poems become examinations, and deconstructions of its underlying ideological assumptions. As he says in “What is an Illinois,” “a human community will, without vote, fanfare, struggle, or even consciousness, adopt an immense and even at times disabling set of abstractions, laws, judgments, names, and imagined and temporal frameworks. And they will both feel it real and call it reality.” Later, in that same poem, he locates the root of those assumptions in Christianity, which “posits a temporally unbounded metaphysical haven, exclusive to humans, beyond death, giving believers little reason to tend or maintain a physical world here.” The separation of body and soul—and the bestowing of a soul upon the human body exclusively—causes us to see this world, and the beings in it, as transitory, disposable. “What is an Illinois” opens with an extended quotation from the state’s “Humane Care for Animals Act,” which defines the term “animal” as “every living creature, domestic or wild, but does not include man.” And that’s the real problem, isn’t it? That divide, that notion that somehow we are different, [End Page 33] separate from the world around us. That we are not, ourselves, animals. For Gudding, not only is this notion that human beings are somehow different from other kinds of animals a flawed one, but the idea that animals aren’t somehow deserving of the basic right not to be killed is baffling. Throughout the book we see him shifting from one mode of discourse to another, from pastiche to argumentation to quotation. Often Gudding quotes from husbandry guides and FAQ sheets about the raising of pigs, and, re-contextualized in this space, their matter-of-fact treatment of things like tooth removal and euthanasia is chilling. There is never any attempt, though, to make the...
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Dec 13, 2017
Karla I Quintana Osuna 
Open Access
