“My favorite kind of book cannot be described as simply ‘about’ anything—an irreducible kind of book that pivots on every page, refuses to be pinned down. M.R. Sheffield has written such a book—a palimpsest of aesthetic and linguistic marvels superimposed upon and pushing against the Reverend H.D. Northrop’s 1897 Marvels of Natural History. This is hybridity at its most nuanced and intelligent—word giving way to image, narrative giving way to lyric, epistle giving way to meditation, and everything folding back into image like ‘so many goddamned rubies.’ Once, Gladys writes, ‘let the wild gentle them like it has you.’ This book will wild you, Reader, gently.”
—Julie Marie Wade, author of Catechism: A Love Story and SIX: Poems
“When the narrator of M.R. Sheffield’s collection professes to imagining ‘making a nest of you,’ we are invited to make a nest back. Each word and image in this text builds a found and invented structure, layer by layer, for us to writhe around inside of. This multimodal work aims to enthrall us with a nontraditional, visual magic, both human and animal.”
—Tate N. Oquendo
“’…there is no grief like this and no name for it,’ Sheffield’s speaker confesses in ‘the boa-constrictor,’ which, like all poems inside marvels of natural history, uncoils to reveal monstrous truths about love and loss in a wilderness haunted by the familial. I have yet to find my way out of Sheffield’s collection, months after entering—I don’t believe I’ll ever want to. Between admiring the partnering images and found language from H.D. Northrop’s book of the same name, this collection asks readers, no dares them, to put their face close to its glass and tap.”
—James A. H. White