in defense of the goat that continues to wander towards the certain doom of the cliff

Praise for Darren C. Demaree

“Darren C. Demaree’s collection is a blanketed conversation with a dear friend. in defense of the goat that continues to wander towards the certain doom of the cliff meanders and weaves—Demaree is a philosopher who confronts our ‘imperiled belief / that knowledge grazes this world / without falling off this world.’ In this novel in verse, each poem searches for meaning, each poem is a universe that demands we ‘view the world view the word view the world.’ This is a collection of the imagination, a collection that insists ‘we can belong in this world’ and there is a ‘joy that comes with flapping one’s arms.’”
– Allison Blevins, author of Cataloguing Pain

“in defense of the goat that continues to wander towards the certain doom of the cliff is a radical, brilliant masterclass in metaphor, a collection of poems that engages deeply with the ‘vital kinship of the invisible empire.’ Every poem here begins and ends where ‘two-thirds of the landscape / has been ruined and two-thirds / of the animals are unknown.’ These poems are brief, mighty and bold; they ground us while insisting that our imaginations must not be forsaken and that we must not be at odds with the world around us. Darren C. Demaree invites readers into ‘the remaining wilderness’ which is being ‘asked / to grow a fungus that can save us.’ When we find ‘too much god in the honey,’ how can we remain rooted? If ‘life is a miracle that can’t / fly,’ in defense of the goat that continues to wander towards the certain doom of the cliff shows us how to go as far as we can on foot.”
– Joan Kwon Glass, author of Night Swim

“Demaree’s collection reads like an extended surrealist aphorism—one that thickly describes ‘this place we have all seen,’ a precarious world that increasingly reveals itself to be ‘adaptative as in refusing / to be the end even if it is / the end of our understanding.’ Demaree articulates across this book as much a poetics as an ethics of creation, of ‘obligation’ to nature that is itself poetry constantly unfolding as much as the rational and the empirical might want to disavow. ‘i’m telling you the science / needs the poetry as much as we need the science,’ Demaree’s speaker urgently proclaims. We ought to heed this, now more than ever in our troubled present.”
– Travis Chi Wing Lau, author of Paring and Vagaries