"It is a rare poet for whom the first comparison that comes to my mind is Anne Carson. Yes, that Anne Carson. But Mammal is a book of such rigorous thinking, rigorous language, and rigorous thinking-about-language, that it merits the highest praise. Another name I would throw into the conversation is Elena Ferrante, since this is an unflinchingly honest book about motherhood, the body, marriage and its discontents, whose narrator, by the final poem, has assumed a novelistic depth of character. By any standard it's a remarkable first book, which reminds us that in poetry, as in life, great challenges yield great rewards."
-Campbell McGrath
"Ana María Caballero's Mammal contemplates the woman as body, the body as wonderous babymaker, while also acknowledging the loss of self as the self makes another. In her case, the body that creates life is the same body that creates exquisite poems. The speaker situates herself in a lineage of mothers and daughters, complex family matters. But she also situates herself as mammal-our developed brains, our ability to feed our young with milk. She explores the science of family making-c-sections, a "nipple stone," wands and gels, and a wrenching poem "Vasectomy"-spoiler alert, the man in the poem doesn't get one. Instead, we have a fearless, profound speaker who acknowledges hard truths: "no one is lonelier than the woman who is loved." This is an ingeniously forthright poetry debut!"
-Denise Duhamel
"The intense and electric poems in Ana María Caballero's MAMMAL deftly circumnavigate a conduit of embodied experience. In linguistically rich poems that shapeshift through a wide panorama of formal possibilities, Caballero smoothly glides along the spectrum between animal and human, instinct and intellect, nature and nurture, motherhood and otherhood. MAMMAL addresses biological and linguistic production and reproduction, and in this volume, Caballero considers sex, procreation, parenting, partnership, and kinship with nuance, verve, and insight. These brilliant and vibrant poems traverse the paradox of the human urge to categorize, separate, and name with the seamless biological interrelations of umbilical cord and breast milk-allowing a universe of complexities to coexist within the fiercely tender ecosystem of this book."
-Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50
