Strange Animals

Vanderploeg is a Canadian grandchild of Dutch and Hungarian immigrants. Originally from Aurora, Ontario, Canada, she has also lived in Budapest and London, and is now settled in Swansea. Some of the poems deal with Vanderploeg's experience of being a grandchild of immigrants and becoming an immigrant herself. ‘Emily Vanderploeg’s clear-eyed lyric poetry explores the questions of where we belong, who we have become, and who or what undertakes that journey alongside us. To read this intimate collection feels like being in conversation with a friend, allowing us the freedom to see ourselves anew...’ – Carolyn Smart ‘Strange Animals is a collection that moves deftly between different kinds of poetic looking: the close up of the personal and intimate, and the longing gaze towards far-away family, language, culture. These are poems of abundance even as they mourn what is lost... sharp and surprising, [they] so often put one in mind of Gwen John's interiors: the beauty and importance of the domestic, and the hard-won rewards found in the self alone. There is heartache here but also a committed hopefulness: these poems have faith that love can emerge in “the space between / the end and the beginning”.’ – Katherine Stansfield 'Vanderploeg takes you to wild places; from Lake Huron to Swansea bedsits... These poems will leave you full of hunger and love; go with her, and let the “Aurora Borealis call you home”.’ – Jessica Mookherjee ‘Reading Strange Animals feels a bit like rummaging around in someone's well-travelled backpack full of old photographs, seashells, tarot, and countless precious found objects collected for "the passing of knowledge”. A brilliant new voice.’ – Roberto Pastore

A Canadian grandchild of Dutch and Hungarian immigrants, Emily Vandeploeg explores issues of language, ritual, death and identity. Strange Animals chart the author’s journey from childhood home to settling across an ocean, moving through the vagaries of modern love as she travels to new cities and a newfound maturity.Strange Animals is collection of experiences - its thread is the author's journey from childhood home to settling across an ocean, moving through the vagaries of modern love as she travels to new cities and a newfound maturity, whilst contemplating the end of youth and what one loses and gains in the process. Throughout these journeys, strange animals appear in the poems, challenging and disrupting both the author's and the reader's experience, asking questions and forcing us to both see and to look at life in curious new ways. A Canadian grandchild of Dutch and Hungarian immigrants, Emily Vanderploeg explores issues of language, ritual, death and identity in poems about her family which open the collection in a close intimate space, which is then ruptured as she and the poems travel to Wales and elsewhere, physically and emotionally, leading us to look at the world through the experiences of animals as people and people as animals, culminating in a sequence of poetry as Tarot - leaving the reader with a fortune told, but more questions than answers.