Consider the Rooster

by Oliver Baez Bendorf

Overview

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST POETRY COLLECTIONS OF 2024 BY LIT HUB AND ELECTRIC LITERATURE

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD IN POETRY

FINALIST FOR THE 2025 CLMP FIRECRACKER AWARD IN POETRY

FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA AWARD FOR TRANSGENDER POETRY

Consider the Rooster serves as an ode to a rooster’s crow, a catalyst for awakening, both literally and figuratively.

Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic, the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police, and the resulting upsurge in reactionary right-wing militia violence, a neighbor in Kalamazoo, Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author’s pet rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary transformation. An ecological consciousness embedded in these verses invites readers to acknowledge their place in a web of relations. Oliver Baez Bendorf’s voice resounds through liminal spaces, at dusk and dawn, across personal meditations and wider cultural awakenings to form a collection overflowing with freedom, rebellion, mischief, and song.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643622385
Publisher:	Nightboat Books
Publication date:	10/01/2024
Pages:	124
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 12.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Advantages of Being Evergreen (2019) and The Spectral Wilderness (2015). He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Publishing Triangle, CantoMundo, Vermont Studio Center, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Born and raised in Iowa, he now lives in Colorado.

Editorial Reviews

"Oliver Baez Bendorf’s surety of voice and formal control guides this rich third collection. . . There is beauty and flight within these poems even as they stay in the earthly and bodily world."
—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub

"Oliver is one of my all-time favorite poets and his third book charms, devastates, and illuminates. I’m not going to make a rooster joke."
—Andrea Lawlor, Pocket Hype

"Oliver Baez Bendorf troubles the boundaries: of countries, of genders, of time periods. . . The wide range of forms in this collection, including prose poems, sestinas, and speculative ekphrasis, cement Bendorf’s status as one of the most interesting poets working today."
—Electric Literature

"Consider the Rooster is a brilliant poetry collection that doubles as a (necessarily fragmentary) philosophical essay on, among other things, nature and the unnatural as they relate to the body-mind; referentiality and naming; the coloniality of gender; animality and the question of rights; communities of care in the context of medicalization; and queer trans diasporican life in the Midwest."
—Urayoán Noel, The Latinx Project

"In poem after poem he builds and rebuilds a body, a story, a desire that are at once familiar and strange, capable of brightness like any headlight but also capable of losing that light in their brokenness which makes us love them even more."
—Natalie Diaz

"The innovative and ecologically minded third collection from Bendorf (Advantages of Being Evergreen) finds solace in the connections between the human and nonhuman world, centering and celebrating transformation. . . Hopeful and surprising, this inviting volume soars."
—Publishers Weekly

"It takes care to write a book like Consider the Rooster and a great deal of vulnerability. Baez Bendorf does not falter. He invites us into the rooster and that 'feverish communal feeling' that is love."
—Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, The Latinx Project

"What gorgeous and ravenous rackets Oliver Bendorf’s poems are made of; what a yearning and beautiful heart. 'Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open,' he writes, which is more or less what these poems do for me: break me open to what might sparkle and blaze, what might glisten and burn inside."
—Ross Gay

"It’s a joy. . .to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex project of transforming their own gender. . . Oliver Bendorf writes from a paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just appeared in the world. A man emergent, a man in love, alive in the fluid instability of any category."
—Mark Doty

"Bendorf brilliantly weaves together personal excavations with cultural mythology and an honored relationship with the natural world in unexpected and satisfying ways on every page."
—Livia Meneghin, Sundress Reads

"Experimental and queer, posthuman and deeply relational, Consider the Rooster dazzles with an open-hearted affirmation of such vital principles as resilience, transition, and pleasure, despite the stultifying impacts of the pandemic, transphobia, and homophobia, grief, and the political and ecological crises of our time."
—Sarah Giragosian, Studies in Literature and Environment

From the Publisher