Poet­ry

The Ani­mal is Chemical

  • Review
By – August 26, 2024

Select­ed by Jeri­cho Brown as the win­ner of the 2022 Levis Prize in Poet­ry, Hadara Bar-Nadav’s new col­lec­tion of poems, The Ani­mal is Chem­i­cal, is a response to his­tor­i­cal and per­son­al trau­ma, as well as an ele­gy to her deceased father. Through com­pelling lan­guage and chill­ing metaphors, Bar-Nadav con­veys both pain and healing. 

Many poems focus on the death, mourn­ing, and tragedy brought about by the Holo­caust — the rel­a­tives who dis­ap­peared, the atroc­i­ties at Babi Yar, and the Ovens by Topf and Sons” with high capac­i­ty designs / for death … / that wed our skin / to brick and wind and dirt.” At the end of the book, Bar-Nadav includes a memo­r­i­al list of approx­i­mate­ly fifty of her fam­i­ly mem­bers who were mur­dered in the Holo­caust. Sev­er­al poems through­out the col­lec­tion cen­ter the expe­ri­ences — both told and imag­ined — of these rel­a­tives and their impact on the speak­er. In one poem, The Singing Pills,” Bar-Nadav makes clear that the dead are always with us: Each of my dead / holds a torch / inside me, bub­bling / up my throat … ” 

Anoth­er poem, Black Screen (Kid­ney Ultra­sound),” is about the hor­ror of dis­abled chil­dren being killed upon arrival at con­cen­tra­tion camps:

Then, in the poem Mute,” Bar-Nadav describes Josef Mengele’s cru­el exper­i­ments on twin chil­dren. This inter­gen­er­a­tional trau­ma, com­bined with her own med­ical tra­vails, caus­es the speak­er to fre­quent­ly dis­trust med­ical pro­fes­sion­als and pharmaceuticals. 

Two of the five sec­tions of this col­lec­tion include era­sure poems, which are a type of found poem using parts of an exist­ing text — in this case, med­ical inserts from pre­scrip­tion drugs — to form a new insight. In these era­sures, Bar-Nadav’s words move across the page in a scat­tered, sparse way, imi­tat­ing the con­fu­sion caused by spe­cif­ic med­ica­tions. In the poem “[Trust us]”, Bar-Nadav writes, 

Bar-Nadav has an eye for the unusu­al, and she chal­lenges assump­tions about what can heal our fam­i­lies and our­selves. She ques­tions the neces­si­ty of cer­tain sci­ences and how they have cre­at­ed even more pain. These har­row­ing, lyri­cal poems are sure to haunt readers. 

Jamie Wendt is the author of the poet­ry col­lec­tion Fruit of the Earth (Main Street Rag, 2018), which won the 2019 Nation­al Fed­er­a­tion of Press Women Book Award in Poet­ry. Her man­u­script, Laugh­ing in Yid­dish, is forth­com­ing in the ear­ly Spring of 2025 by Broad­stone Books and was a final­ist for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize in Poet­ry. Her poems and essays have been pub­lished in var­i­ous lit­er­ary jour­nals and antholo­gies, includ­ing Fem­i­nine Ris­ing, Green Moun­tains Review, Lilith, Jet Fuel Review, the For­ward, Poet­i­ca Mag­a­zine, Cata­ma­ran, and oth­ers. She con­tributes book reviews to the Jew­ish Book Coun­cil. She received a Push­cart Prize Hon­or­able Men­tion and was nom­i­nat­ed for Best Spir­i­tu­al Lit­er­a­ture. She was select­ed as an Inter­na­tion­al Mer­it Award win­ner in the Atlanta Review 2022 Inter­na­tion­al Poet­ry Com­pe­ti­tion. She holds an MFA in Cre­ative Writ­ing from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Nebras­ka Oma­ha. She is a mid­dle school Human­i­ties teacher and lives in Chica­go with her hus­band and two kids.

Discussion Questions