Animal Children

Animal Children is a book of tender, surreal masculinity, full of nurturing alchemists, cities moaning because they wish to be wild, and the very best kissers. Reminiscent of Russell Edson, Charlie Simic, and Kenji Miyazawa, Behm-Steinberg understands the gentle twist that can make a piece come alive, like a balloon animist who squeak squeak squeaks something seemingly simple into sudden delight. “I talk to you about love, I do it every day. I’d do it even if nothing green grew inside me. I’d do it even if nobody paid me for anything,” Behm-Steinberg writes. Animal Children teems with rare, quiet, radical hope: read it and feel heartened.
–Katie Farris

Like Ovid, Hugh Behm-Steinberg is preoccupied with transformation and resolution, the many complications of life negotiated with gentleness and humor in his prose poem collection,AnimalChildren.For any problem that presents itself, there is an imaginative way out in these contemporary fables. Even failing results in new possibilities and constructs: an unfaithful mouth-eel leads to a new understanding; a couple’s ride in a laundry dryer becomes an occasion for truth and confession. All of these moments have a sweetness to them, a transformative energy leading to new inventions and insights: currency based on sleep and wakefulness; an antidote to death;metamorphosis into a (toothless) bird while in the dentist’s chair. Often the new identity or circumstance leads to solidarity with one or many others.It is a poetry of connection with many resolutions partaking in love and ingenuity. Read this poignant collection to restore your faith in language and its makers.
–Maxine Chernoff

The world is always in wonder in Animal Children, Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s garden of surreal delights, a fecund plot of deadpan fantasies with a tender heart in love. Everything is possible here according to the permissive rules of language and uniquely conceived idioms. What Behm-Steinberg recognizes so essentially is how choice makes a paradise of hell, how a world where anything goes can be an anarchy, too, of comity, as we only have to wish
–Michael Mejia, Editor-in-Chief of Western Humanities Review Co-Founding Editor of Ninebark Press

At the reading, everyone falls asleep,” begins the first brief story in Hugh Behm-Steinberg’sAnimal Children. We readers become that audience, somnambulating our way through generously domestic dreamscapes in which God creates the universe to keep boredom-prone Death busy, and in which there’s a store where you can shop for your third eye, and in which there is an ongoing internal eel problem to sort out for ourselves. Alchemist to zombie cure, these flash pieces will lovingly muck up anyone’s sluggish relationship to the everyday.
–Paula Cisewski

A striking menagerie of the whimsical and surreal that will writhe around your sense of reality. From cows learning Kung Fu to eels who won’t leave your body, the brief (and often wild) encounters in Animal Children had me both laughing and scratching at my skin. An achievement of miniatures in the vein of Etgar Keret from one of our funniest and most inventive writers.
—Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone.