Wet Specimen, Abigail Raley

Abigail Raley’s Wet Specimen is a poetry collection dedicated to celebrating sensuality, tenderness, and the rewilding of the self. In her debut collection, Raley curates a portrait of desire that moves through ecoscapes, homescapes, and genderscapes. Lush with surreal metaphors and fiercely devoted to a corporeal lexicon, these poems echo slick humor while protesting gendered power dynamics. Through prose poems, free verse, and pantoums, Wet Specimen interrogates the primal capacity to want, to hate, and to love. Raley’s inventive poems resist rigidity in favor of play, eroticism, and embodied discovery. Attentive to sickness, animals, love, and gender, Wet Specimen revels in a profound wonder of flesh, pus, and lust, encouraging the merging of self and body with the natural world.

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“Wet Specimen is full of sensation made new: insides becoming outsides, visceral cross-species kinships, and the glorious, slippery, burning textures of language. Abigail Raley defamiliarizes the body, alchemizing the estrangements of illness and violence into a bold poetics, turning expectations on their heads and exhibiting a grotesque sensualism that calls to mind such greats as Kim Hyesoon and Clarice Lispector. Wet Specimen will keep you leaning forward even as you squirm, riveted by convergences of the muck and loveliness of what it is to be alive.”

—Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat

“Abigail Raley’s Wet Specimen gives us a body in conversation with itself: questioning, cajoling, having it out. This collection—which moves from the pain of chronic illness to the transcendent agony of the erotic—offers the reader a chance to remember how alive the body is even as, each day, it dies a little more. In language that palpates the world with a kind of deft desire, everything offers itself up to be consumed: egg, river, labia, even the light. Raley crafts the lines with a kind of hunger that begets more hunger, crooking a finger toward each embodied yearning until we remember that even the rot at the core is sweet. These poems—lush and knowing—are fearless in their appetite.”

—Keetje Kuipers, author of Lonely Women Make Good Lovers

“One of the facts foundational to Abigail Raley’s Wet Specimen is that sometimes the body with cystic fibrosis is literally beaten into greater wellness.  Love and care can be violent, necessarily.  Developing and “re-wilding” an apt poetics of radical embodiment (after Bob Flanagan’s fearsomely vulnerable example), Raley has written a book of surprising contrasts: theatrical and startling when most intimate, poignant when most intrepid, controlled and lyric when most irreverent or feral.  “It was the beginning of my mission // to find my girlhood, which had fallen behind the task / of pleasure, which was different from the pleasure / of my abuses, which were more like mosses // that spread across the lattice of my body and, / like me, opened, algal bruises greening my cheeks.”  A stunning debut, a phenomenal talent.”

—Brian Blanchfield, author of Proxies: Essays Near Knowing 

“Abigail Raley’s stunning debut collection, Wet Specimen, a title that conjures jars of preserved bodies kept for study or display, casts an unwavering gaze on complicated relationships. One of those relationships we get in these poems is Raley’s own with cystic fibrosis and her body. In this wonder-filled collection we also find fruit bats and anglerfish among the other-than-human beings that enable Raley to deftly explore and expose troubling relationships. These poems teach us about making our way in a difficult world. Make sure Wet Specimen is part of your life’s course of study; you won’t regret it.”

—Sean Hill, author of The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures