"How can I keep from celebrating these poems, now that I know them?" asks blogger Holly Wendt about her experience with Kingdom Animalia (BOA, 2011) by Aracelis Girmay. In her piece "Read and Recommended," she calls the poetry "vibrant, so much of everything I want to see everywhere: color and joy and snap." "First..." says Wendt, "I love BOA Editions. They make beautiful, interesting books that are written by artists I like a lot ... What remains with me from [Kingdom Animalia] as a whole is mortality ... I've never read a poetry collection like it." Explaining her point further, she likens Girmay's poems to "large tragedies and small, and again, that constant feeling of grave dust on the pages (dry, honest dirt, dirt we have to admire and respect)." Girmay "makes the reader know" the subject, creating reverence and honesty that make this a highly recommended book. "What Girmay does, over and over: she shows us the rich points of overlap, overlap of life and death, the skin of lovers, the place one is and the place one is going and the place one has been. History and representation." Click here to read the entire piece. Kingdom Animalia is available for purchase at the BOA Bookstore.