Description
Annah Browning’s poetry collection Cryptid takes on weird phenomena and real desire. In these pages, a young woman from the rural South longs to be abducted by aliens; a female sasquatch spies on human families and pines for love; a Chinese spy balloon is heartbroken by being shot down. Through these personas and a host of strange happenings from American folklore, Cryptid probes the longing for something more buried at the heart of the lives of women and those deemed “other” by an unjust world. By turns irreverently funny, grotesquely bodily, and eerily heartbreaking, Cryptid insists on the beauty of the unseen and the disbelieved.
About the author
Annah Browning is the author of the poetry collection Witch Doctrine (University of Akron Press, 2020) and the chapbook The Marriage (Horse Less Press, 2013), and is a cofounder of Grimoire Magazine. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and her PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Hailing from the foothills of South Carolina, Browning currently calls southern Illinois home, where she is a professor of English at Blackburn College.
Praise for Cryptid
Tender, weird, and heartbreaking, Browning’s collection pulses with striking imagery and lush phrasing in honor of the lonely, the unloved, and the abandoned. I want to be abducted by this book.
—Alisa Alering, author of Smothermoss
Cryptid bleeds a cunningly ekphrastic mimesis of the National Enquirer. Inviting you to indulge your favorite conspiracy theories, these uncanny love poems will force you to question your assumptions of safety, danger, and subjectivity. Collecting all sorts of tender grotesqueries, Browning dishes out unexpected mothers, voiced shadows hiding among canyons and mountains, and the gentlest abductions you can imagine. Readers eat the Lady Sasquatch’s broken heart, and it tastes of “furred-over gelatin” and “lacerated beef.” Listen closely to the voices of familiar and unfamiliar monsters. Gravity shifts, and they’re calling out into the night. Can you hear them? These poems—engorged, embodied, enmouthed—won’t go quietly.
—Hannah V. Warren, author of Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales
Annah Browning’s Cryptid is a book for the longing-afflicted, which is to say, for all of us. “I am always washing/dishes, I am always here/and not elsewhere,” the would-be alien abductee tells us, and yet Browning knows how our minds refuse to stay put, traversing the forests, looking up, peering out or peering in. Ultimately, with tenderness and killer wit, this stellar collection reminds me why I adore poetry: because what is a poem itself if not a cryptid, a breathing, vegetal entity that inhabits the space between knowing and unknowability? Like “the window glass shaking after the door slam,” you’ll feel these poems in your spine for a long while after.
–Kerri Webster, author of Lapis (Wesleyan University Press, 2022)
