Written<i> </i>during the last five years of the poet's father's life, <i>Creature </i>is a book about love, destruction, and the self, all standing in relation to family and the natural world. The poems themselves try to move toward what can't be said by finding connection with other life forms: hawks, hummingbirds, pelicans, lizards, horses, ravens, squid. By moving past linguistic walls into otherness, words become proximate to mystery and inhabit territory where expanses open and embodiment is always on the verge of transformation.