Tom Cull's ​Bad Animals

Reviewed by Aaron Schneider

Insomniac Press, 2018

The poems in Tom Cull’s debut collection, Bad Animals, resemble its titular creatures: they are a bit unruly, sometimes disruptive, occasionally difficult to pin down, sliding easily across the borders between modes, consistently surprising in the best sense of the word. The book is divided into three sections. The first two are filled with shorter poems that cover a diverse range of subject matter—the Thames River in London, Ontario, a waterway that is close to Cull’s heart and central to his artistic practice, environmental concerns, his roots in Huron County, the fauna of southern Ontario, his father, dad bods, MMA, and the change room at the local YMCA. The third section is a long poem that follows five vacuums that are thrown into the Thames and make their meandering way down the river. For all its diversity, the collection hangs together well—the tonal shifts between poems, and often within poems themselves, are deft, and often revelatory.
 
Perhaps the most striking poems in he book are some of its quietest. Included alongside the more overtly political poems, the ecological lyrics and humorous pieces, such as the ode to the YMCA men’s change room “The Dinks Are Out,” are intimate poems that strike a note of reverence and introspection, and that contain some remarkable lines. In “Shelter,” Cull watches his partner dance with her cat:

And these two old friends recapture another time,
another way of being with each other,
that is not gone—just stowed away.
Safe and warm—abiding.

“At the Pinery,” a poem that sets death and childhood against the backdrop of a Lake Huron beach, stuns with its simplicity:

Last week the boy’s other dad died
alone in a room in Istanbul.
We had to tell him; he asked, Are you sure
he’s dead? Did anyone check?

​In some ways, these quieter poems anchor the collection, recurring at regular intervals, providing a stable reference point from which Cull strikes out sometimes to grapple with broader subjects, sometimes on flights of comic whimsy.
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And this book is often very funny. The already-mentioned “The Dinks Are Out” is replete with wordplay that (sorry, I can’t help myself) milks the topic for all it’s worth. List poems, such as “Collective Nouns,” contain their fair share of jokes:

A slut of peacocks
A turd of capitalists
A bunion of Floridians
A Charmin of dung beetles. 

“Baptist” is built around one of those family stories that makes everyone laugh no matter how many times they’ve heard it, and the poem itself is just as funny for the reader.
 
Sometimes the funny poems turn serious, even mournful. “Collective Nouns” ends with an intimation of extinction:

A lick of nipples
A threnody of hyenas
A regret of whales
A poet of dodos

And “The Dinks Are Out” shifts in its closing stanza from laughter to a surreal and sympathetic vision:

The dinks, on the other, hand keep their own council,
hang in stupor, just feet from one another
like fellow travellers locked in cryogenic sleep
dreaming of vast carnivals--
muscled cotton-candy makers
spin airy clouds of neon pink fur,
spilling over, covering everything,
the peaks and valleys of the roller coaster
engulfed by a great and levelling swell.

The humor also crops up in more serious poems. For example, in the collection’s opening poem, “After River,” a poem about the Thames that is, like several in the book, focused on the detritus that chokes it, you find the line, “This is the dawning of the age of aquariums.”  These are poems that are rarely one thing, that rarely stay put, and, in that, they are like the books titular subject matter.
 
Not surprisingly, Bad Animals contains a lot of poems about animals, and, in particular, animals that don’t behave the way we want them to. They are bad, and what tends to make them bad is the way they move across human boundaries. Squirrels get into a farmhouse. An entire poem is dedicated to invasive species. A possum rides north, crosses the Canadian border, and, like the squirrels, gets into a house. A bear comes south. The “yellow-chevroned parakeets of Los Angels are not indigenous. Like the palm trees in which they roost, they are green cards in the Emerald City.” And when these animals enter human spaces they carry a destructive, even menacing energy. The possum “has life enough yet and mouth full of teeth.” But the danger they pose is limited, circumscribed. The possum is only a pest, and the animals are only menacing, never really dangerous. The bear is swiftly dealt with. And the list of invasive species that contains “zebra mussels,” “the emerald ash borer” and “phragmites” also includes “Genghis Kanye” and ends with “Right Said Fred.” There is a mournfulness running through these poems that seems to be tied to the recognition of the power of nature and likewise of the reduction of that power, to a registering of the loss that occurs when danger is reduced to annoyance.
 
The same sense of loss threads its way through the collection’s treatment of home. If the book is emphatically located on the banks of the Thames River in London, Ontario, its secondary landscape is slightly north, in Huron County, where Cull grew up. The poems set in this locale are poems of returning, and, by and large, poems of loss. “Huron County,” a poem shot through with the kind of specific, intimate, unmistakeable details that anyone familiar with that area of Ontario will immediately recognize, charts a return to a childhood home:

We turn off the highway,
gravel pops in the wheel wells,
stop at your old house,
stand on the dirt road …

But the house has been sold, and, the poems explains in is closing line, “Trespassing is coming home.” “On the Sale of My Farm” follows a similar trajectory, narrating the sale of Cull’s farm after his father’s death, and closing with the poet returning a year later, after the farm has been turned into a marijuana grow-op and then raided by police. The property is dotted with “KEEP OUT signs.” He approached the house:

The back door was unlocked. I turned the knob
and paused. Something stirred
on the inside. Something upstairs,
 
in a corner. Waking.
I slowly released the doorknob and turned away.
                In the grey disguise of years,
                Seeking ache of memory here.

Home is complex, often elsewhere. The door to it may be unlocked, but it cannot be opened.
 
The long poem that is the book’s third section weaves these disparate threads together into Bad Animals’ longest and most complex piece. “Full Fathom Five” begins with a pack of teenagers picking up five vacuums that have been put out with the trash, and throwing them into the Thames—a moment redolent with the book’s humor and concerns with masculinity. The poem follows the vacuums down the river until the last remaining vacuum, the Dirt Devil, reaches the ocean, meets a school of hammerheads, and begins to transform into shark. But the vacuum cannot follow the other sharks:

​The tugging more persistent now, the drag
of a fishing line or umbilical tie,
she turns and sees: the cord. She has reached its end.
She twists but cannot break the plug out of a socket somewhere
back in time …

The vacuum is pulled back up the St. Lawrence, back up the Thames, and simultaneously back in time to the Pleistocene, and the poem ends:

She comes to rest below a dam ten thousand years old
and yet to be built. On an antlered river
yet to be names, by other names— 
Askunessippi, Thames, la Tranche.
She returns to the place she never left.
Settling in, one remaining ruby encrusted
on her nose, she sinks
into the muck, winking at the crayfish.
It is here, she thinks,
and the belly of something soft nuzzles up
extending a fin that feels like fingers.

The poems in this collection are like this last of its animals, boundary-crossing, often protean, not always easily themselves, but always deeply grounded. Bad Animals is a strong debut that will surprise and reward anyone who picks it up.

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Aaron Schneider’s stories have appeared/are forthcoming in The Danforth Review, filling Station, The Puritan,Hamilton Arts and Letters, untethered, and The Maple Tree Literary Supplement. His story “Cara’s Men (As Told to You in Confidence)” was nominated for the Journey Prize by The Danforth Review. He runs the Creative Writers Speakers Series at Western University. His first book, Grass-Fed, is forthcoming from Quattro Books in the fall of 2018.