Description
Poetry. Environmental Studies. Finalist for The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) Creative Writing Book Award. HOW TO DRAW A RHINOCERNOS, the first book of poems by Canadian writer, scholar, and lawyer Kate Sutherland, mines centuries of rhinoceros representations in art and literature to document the history of European and North American encounters with the animal—from the elephant-rhinoceros battles staged by monarchs in the Middle Ages; the rhinomania that took hold in France and later in Italy in response to the European travels of Clara the 'Dutch' Rhinoceros in the mid-1700s; the menageries and circuses of the Victorian era; the exploits of celebrated twentieth-century hunters like Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway; and the trade in rhinoceros horn artefacts that thrives online today. Along the way, it explores themes of colonialism, animal welfare, and conservation.
Sutherland was inspired on this poetic path by Clara, an eighteenth-century rhinoceros she first encountered in porcelain form in an exhibit of ceramic animals at Toronto's Gardiner Museum. This chance experience set her off on a grand quest to learn all she could of Clara's story, and resulted in a collection that combines Robert Kroetschian documentary poetics with the meticulous research and environmental passion of Elizabeth Kolbert, to successfully examine the centuries-long path of the rhinoceros that's brought it to the brink of global extinction.
Readers of contemporary poetry, as well as those audiences interested in natural history, animal welfare, and conservation, and people who have followed Sutherland's scholarly and literary careers (and their intersections in her most recent academic work that focuses on law and poetry), will relish the rich detail and odd tales of historical rhinoceroses and the people who have kept, shown, and traded in them, as depicted using a range of poetic techniques that only a critical eye like Sutherland's could deliver.
"Kate Sutherland has created a surprising, beautiful and often tragic menagerie of poems about a powerful, peaceful beast that has the misfortune of being both magnificent and magnificently horned. Her brilliant resurrection of 18th-century rhinosuperstar Clara is an enchanting bonus."—Stuart Ross
"Kate Sutherland writes a book of poems with the understanding that the colonial encounter requires a deliberate destruction of the colonized. In HOW TO DRAW A RHINOCERNOS, Sutherland draws upon historical documents and imagined perspectives to present a palimpsest that maps imperialist invasion, European plunder of brown and black countries, kidnapping, murder, and enslavement. In other words, the poems reveal the true face of empire. In verse that invents, alludes, and allows for considerable vivid delving, the poems present and speak back to white violence and a colonialism that framed and imprisoned those that they conquered (including people) as exploited 'exotics' for European appetites."—Hoa Nguyen
Author Bio
Kate Sutherland was born in Scotland, grew up in Saskatchewan, and now lives in Toronto, where she is a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. She is the author of two collections of short stories: Summer Reading (winner of a Saskatchewan Book Award for Best First Book) and All In Together Girls. HOW TO DRAW A RHINOCEROS (BookThug, 2016) is Sutherland's first collection of poems.
Author City: TORONTO, ON CAN