Crea­ture is a com­plex poet­ics of vital­i­ty, and it immac­u­late­ly cleaves: even as it under­scores how liv­ing in an inher­ent­ly inhos­pitable envi­ron­ment will dis­pos­sess us of the world and one anoth­er, mak­ing ani­mal of man, it sutures the rent evo­lu­tion­ary tree, glo­ri­fy­ing the inter­de­pen­dence of each extant thing. Michael Duma­n­is expert­ly cul­ti­vates the mul­ti­plic­i­ty of lan­guage and makes of ​“crea­ture” a mar­velous con­tronym; we are a crea­ture as in a beast, debased, behold­en to nature, and we are crea­ture as in an exten­sion of cre­ation, improb­a­bly sen­tient, mor­tal, here. In ​“Auto­bi­og­ra­phy,” the speak­er attests to the con­tra­dic­tion at the root of cog­nizance: ​“Am, as an ani­mal, // anx­ious. Appendages always aflut­ter, / am an amaz­ing acci­dent: alive.” How does the human mam­mal embody both and nei­ther — com­mu­nal and itin­er­ant, leav­ing home to approach it, as an immi­grant and a geo­graph­ic nomad, as someone’s child and another’s par­ent, as being and thing? How do we nego­ti­ate our ouro­boric iden­ti­ties while attuned to not just our own fragili­ty, but an impend­ing glob­al extinc­tion event? The answer is the absence of answer. ​“In the begin­ning, I thought a great deal / about death and sun­light, et cetera,” Duma­n­is admits in ​“Squalor,” but ​“The Dou­ble Dream of Spring” absolves us of out­smart­ing imper­ma­nence. ​“O what a ball I had, spend­ing the days.” And what should we do in this ver­nal brevi­ty but exhaust it? We each only have so long to trace our hand ​“over the stony bones / that, fused togeth­er, hold [our] only face.”