To be a cat owner is to spend innumerable hours entranced by the things your cats do. The author, a prolific documenter of her cats both in photographs and in verse, knows this all too well. \u201cI have a camera that\u2019s inside my eye,\u201d begins one poem. \u201cMy little babies are always posing for me. \/ Sometimes they run, and sometimes they play, \/ then my minds eye video stores it all away.\u201d In these 24 poems, McCready praises her many cats, current and former, documenting the joys and trials of cat ownership. She composes odes to particular cats, like Devlin and Rhys, and writes from the perspective of others, like the \u201cterrible and alone\u201d Daisy. Her cats are of the sphynx breed, some short-haired and some hairless, and the poet relishes in the unusual aesthetic of their wrinkled skin and bat-like ears: \u201cA thing that might seem odd and wrong, that looked as ancient as a crone, \/ someone once found beauty there, and now I\u2019ll never be alone.\u201d McCready grapples with the occasional heartbreak, like the strange illnesses cats sometimes get, or the knowledge that she will outlive them: \u201cEventually they always go \/ In the back of our mind we knew, we know. Love in a body will never stay, although we wish it was that way.\u201d The rhyming verses are full of memorable figurative images, as here when the author describes the cats sleeping on her bed at night: \u201cTonight my bed\u2019s like a sanded shore, \/ where naked sun worshipers have come to snore.\u201d The poems are accompanied by photographs of the cats by the author and Bray and by McCready\u2019s illustrations, most of them realistic though some fantastical (including, in one disturbing tableau, two cats spliced into Michelangelo\u2019s Creation of Adam, reaching toward one another with human hands). The book captures the strange worlds pet owners create for themselves and their animals, and while fellow cat owners may or may not enjoy these highly specific poems, they will undoubtedly recognize some of their own obsession.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To be a cat owner is to spend innumerable hours entranced by the things your cats do. The author, a prolific documenter of her cats both in photographs and in verse, knows this all too well. \u201cI have a camera that\u2019s inside my eye,\u201d begins one poem. \u201cMy little babies are always posing for me. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4336,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4335"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}