Bestiary, The
Dennis Cooley conducts a chorus of “clucks & barks & muffled cries” to unconstrained cacophony. Bursting with a remarkable and encompassing cast of spiders and fish, crows and bears, rats, chickens, and cows, the bestiary gives free rein to very human feelings and the way they grow, stunt, and stampede out on the prairie landscape. Amid hushed and howling moments, the natural bends uncanny while the extraordinary roots into the organic under Cooley’s careful eye.
Filled with owlish wisdom, this bestiary hovers, swoops, and tilt-wings, as the crow flies, over the contours of a prairie and its species unique to Dennis Cooley, his tender observations, his wild surmise.
—Aritha van Herk
The world shines with life, with mystery, animated by animals, and in The Bestiary Cooley gives voice to it all. Compressing coal-black crows to diamond, Cooley crafts jewelled lines.
— Jonathan Ball, Clockfire and The National Gallery
The Bestiary is a Naturalis Mysteria, an encyclopedia of mysteries discovered in an uncanny land by Dennis Cooley, the Pliny of these prairies. It is a meta-Metamorphosis, a translation of myths uncovered in an unreliable library by our postmodern Ovid.
— Nathan Dueck, A Very Special Episode
