Afield (Poetry and Image)

Afield is a work of creative ethnography that uses poetry and visual art to reveal the complexity of human relations with other creatures in a time of planetary peril. Based on her participatory research at four sites of human-animal interaction, Linnea Ryshke uses evocative imagery and sensory language to describe the layers of dissonance that make up the more subtle methods of human control over other animals.

Structured in four parts, the book devotes a chapter to each place of research: a wildlife research station, a cognitive zoology laboratory, a bird conservation center, and a remote town in the Swedish Arctic. Whether describing the vulnerability and resilience of reindeer, the elusiveness of wild boars, or the velocity of swallows, the poems point to the moral imperative for reverence and humility toward the sovereign mystery of other animal lives. Diverse and imaginative in structure and form, the poems use specificity to reveal broader issues surrounding human systems of knowledge.

Afield pushes back against the scientific, rational-based bias that underlies most human conceptions of other creatures and advocates for spaces of uncertainty that acknowledge the limits of human metrics in quantifying animal worlds and capacities. Ryshke invites readers to inhabit this space of ambiguity and not knowing, which can ultimately be a fertile ground for change.