The Frog Poem Project

The Frog Poem Project extends our thinking about how poetry and visual artists can interrogate interhuman violence. We are asked to reckon with how we are pressed to commit everyday violations, even when dissecting a frog in a science classroom. Footnotes become small poems on how what a ""frog is"" becomes an act that humans stage, and that stage is shared by those who are dehumanized in medicalized and racialized ideas about sexuality and spectacle. While the lines move across the page, becoming a linguistic representation of how frog's bodies hold ""an amorphous pouch/peopled by long tiny bones/ribs in their cages/house,"" what follows are medical records and scientific definitions, drawings that both critique and capture knowledge's roving gaze. The poems collaged with sourced language reveal just some of the fault lines within dominant societal ideas about sexuality and disability, revealing how both find themselves structured by violence. The work of clinical language to remove itself from the harm it can create becomes a poetics of how knowledge can sometimes function as violation, resulting in a book that refuses to sit comfortably in any singular genre or mode, blending languages, stories, and voices across mediums to insist that ""with movement"" between them ""there is healing."" If you are a reader looking to disrupt your assumptions about genres and modes, especially those of species-being and care, this book will deliver that disruption, leaving new interdisciplinary strategies for care in its wake. -- C. R. Grimmer, Ph.D., M.F.A., Assistant Professor, Poetry Writing, Department of English, Utah State University