‘They Gather Around Me, the Animals’: Kunjana Parashar’s poetry unites the domestic and the wild

Kunjana Parashar’s debut poetry collection, They Gather Around Me, the Animals, is the winner of the 2024 Barbara Stevens Poetry Book Award. It is a quietly disarming work that slips past the reader’s defences, through a deep, sustained attention to the overlooked and the ordinary. In a moment in the poetry world where ecopoetry often leans toward urgency or activism, Parashar’s poems resist the impulse to instruct or alert us. Instead, the poems display radical humility, constructed on a base of keen observation, dwelling, and resistance.

The book invites the reader with poems like “Dedication”, “Prayer”, and “Wait”, which slowly set the tone of Parashar’s poetics. Instead of imperative instructions, she tells us about her dedication to the ordinariness of nature’s beings, walking us through the observant nature lover’s tasks that are simply waiting, listening and digging “into the dark sleep of moss.”

What makes this collection stand out is its commitment to the unspectacular. The animals of the title are not the majestic creatures of nature documentaries. They are indeed sewer gnats, frogs, cabbage moths, millipedes, and lizards. These creatures are not used as metaphors for human emotion or political commentary. They are not like anything else. They are simply themselves, and are present,...

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