Questions for Animals

Poetry. Women's Studies. In her second book, Hamilton writes of the unspeakable, both as it is at the heart of Buddhist question practice and as it occurs in the circumstances of incest: in this book, the unspeakable complicates the unspeakable. Does Buddhistic practice encourage the erasure of the self much as poetic practice encourages the erasure of a poet's reading and narrative self from a poem, or as an act of rape teaches its child victim self-erasure? Hamilton's exploration often takes the form of the sonnet, a word that Paul Oppenheimer has suggested has its origin in sonitus, the music of the spheres perceived as deafening; multiple meanings emerge and dissipate in the poems, giving the reader space to have a circular and visceral experience of this moving work.