In her book Beasts of Burden (2017), disability scholar and activist Sunaura Taylor identifies overlapping rhetorics of ableism and speciesism to expose the damaging premises of both. Even progressive environmentalists, Taylor points out, “betray a preference for the whole,” celebrating the supposedly more autonomous lives of wild animals over domesticated ones, and preferring to focus on the structural conditions necessary for sustainable farms rather than ascribe value to any particular animals populating them. Sustainability as a system ostensibly requires that we even take a rationalistic view of animal slaughter, a schema under which caring about any individual creature is viewed as “naive and sentimental.” But Taylor interrogates these deep-seated assumptions, showing how they emerge from a fear of embracing interdependency when in fact, as the feminist and disability theorists she cites have long argued, we are fundamentally interdependent beings; denial of this reality has permitted endless exploitation and oppression. Taylor argues, on the contrary, that any animal, however “dependent”—the state they were born into, in a cruel tautological logic—possesses the agency to “speak to us,” if only we pay heed to them “voicing their preferences and desires.”

You already know I’m going to say a poet is the one who can do it. Stacy Szymaszek’s latest work, Essay, opens with a calibrating:

Connection in these lines is tentative, on loan, ambient at best. This question of “a tone to live in” turns out to be a nagging one, and in subsequent passages we find Szymaszek wondering “if this tone is still / something people want to make,” and noting (this is her eighth book) “the growing problem of outgrowing a style for the hundredth / time.” Again, in one of the book’s early sections, the poem is “a rare thing / that happens between writer’s / blocks.” Having a day job that she needs to show up for doesn’t help: “I have ten minutes to close the warp between then and now / to create a garment for my ever changing / understanding.”

If Szymaszek is so attuned to her own tonal footing, it’s because she appreciates the discipline required by the ongoing spiritual autobiography that constitutes her poetics. Journal-as-artform means wagering everything on the appearance of those ever-evolving, subterranean narratives that require scrupulous concentration to discern. In a discursive moment when people are always asking for “the takeaway,” Szymaszek’s awareness of the “ever changing” quality of understanding helps make clear the stance her work has always taken: to develop her consciousness in the reader’s full view, not toward some perfected vision but in love with unfolding itself. Still, it isn’t lost on her that a genuine commitment to transformation brings challenges that intensify with each effort. And so it is no wonder this book starts out haunted: by illnesses and ailments, by inherited normativities always threatening to impinge on an “aging queer life,” and most terrifyingly by the stories Szymaszek tells of artists who went underappreciated or actually disappeared in middle age. Reading about Lew Welch, Karen Dalton, and Julius Eastman in this season of the tragically abrupt deaths of many beloved poets only amplifies the book’s contending with what happens when the ability to transform is driven into obscurity, occluded by the body’s failure, or simply cut short. This poet who doesn’t believe in the last word is caught thinking about its inevitable, possibly all-too-sudden arrival.

These poems register real, passing time—it’s not a straightforward narrative (and the slippage in the lines produces more indeterminacy than I’m describing). All the more compelling, then, when the story palpably shifts. The day job is at a Hudson Valley dairy farm where Szymaszek has worked in development for several years. She starts drifting away from her desk to groom, feed, and visit with the cows. She’s diverted, then intrigued, then deeply engaged by their doings. There are favorites—Donna, Donut—that are not just chosen by Szymaszek, but choose her in turn. Others are aloof, and some we must accede to admiring from afar. In other words, the cows voice their preferences and desires, as Taylor, speculating about animal consciousness, promised they would.

Szymaszek was always a great city poet, her curious imagination endlessly fed by the whorl of readings and conversations, trains and streets, surging rivals and echoing forebears. Here I see that, more than anything, she is just extremely adept at gleaning: patient, observant, empathetic, non-intrusive, practical, and stubborn:

There is powerful writing about factory farming, and there is nature writing of every kind, but these aren’t Szymaszek’s projects. Instead, in a bucolic dailiness that hearkens back paradoxically to those urban adventures, we get to know those very particular animals that even an earnest effort at sustainability can obscure behind systems. The result is revelatory comedy and grandeur without anthropomorphizing or trampling on the opacities of the strange bovine other. When the climactic cow parade goes by, one cow is crowned with flowers that another decides to grab for a snack, someone poops, one takes on the quality of a “Viking ship,” and others literally jump for joy. This is a contemplative arcadia spattered liberally with mud and manure, in which we track habits and antics, kinships and friendships, and the day-to-day condition of certain vulvas from the edge of our seats.

The farmers, ubiquitous along the way, indulge and respect the poet in their midst. At the same time, they wield their common sense, their own ethics, and their not-inconsiderable knowledge of nature and business. They aren’t the enemy—Szymaszek makes way for them, listens to their advice, and thanks them at the end of the book—but it’s impossible, as we read, not to interrogate their assurance. Cows are loaded onto a truck, if they’re unproductive or unsuited to the farm, and sent off to slaughter, sometimes returning in the form of a meal. It’s the way of things, and Szymaszek knows her occasional fantasies of a field somewhere where cow friends might live to a ripe old age is a difficult or even impossible one. But the implicit contention—the meaning of any being’s existence—ultimately calls back the specters of the beginning with redoubled force. Szymaszek writes that “compassion only goes so far in an inhumane world,” and the book’s final pages turn increasingly to the crimes of the “annihilating nation state.” Inescapably, “genocide is the context for everything here / murder of Trans kids to militarism on MTA,” and the book records, among other unspeakable tragedies, the death of Palestinian writer Hiba Abu Nada by Israeli airstrike on October 20, 2023.

Poets of the everyday risk quietism. But for Szymaszek, attention to the daily reveals the moral and political stakes inherent in any lived moment and in these momentous days. Essay spills over into its acknowledgements: “I hope this book offers a reminder of the dignity of these and all animals and the responsibility we have to care for them and understand our relationality.” The volume contains Szymaszek’s sensitive drawings of cow-friends, and describes cow myths, and cow- and nature poets writing over several millennia. I re-read it while also diving into the new James Schuyler biography, and persisted in my hero worship of writers who articulate a strong central persona the better to somehow lighten the pressure of their wide-ranging perceptions. I’m the one who still wants the tone. Poetry’s full of surprises or, in any case, I didn’t see this coming. It’s not too late to live on the farm.