To Wreck and Regenerate: Kirsten Reneau’s “Sensitive Creatures” https://ift.tt/h8CU0SF
In her debut collection of essays, Sensitive Creatures, Kirsten Reneau leaves it all on the page: trauma, sexual assault, addiction, suicidal ideation, and amongst the angsty detritus, there remains the undertones of love and hope. Over the course of twenty-one short essays, split into two parts — “The Wreckage We Do” and “The Regeneration” — Reneau explores nature and its creatures, connecting that world with our own all-too-human existence.
In the very opening line of the prologue, Reneau writes, “The first thing you must know is this: several kinds of newts can regenerate their entire body in pieces… plucked and pulled from the body one at a time, they can regrow them shiny and new, and the newt continues living.” The last paragraph of the prologue states, “Scientists believe that humans’ DNA can carry memories of traumatic stress, changing a person on a molecular level.” Herein, the essays begin, examining the destruction we inflict on ourselves, the necessary struggles of growing and learning, gaining and losing, and how we overcome, adapt, and what stays with us through all the wreckage and reformation.
In “What I Remember,” the opening essay, we learn that a giraffe’s heart weighs twenty-five pounds and that a chaser beetle spends its life searching for heat and flames to eat charred bark. We also learn of an incident of some sort — one that left bruises, one that left blood, one that left an imprint. Three essays later, in “How the Cicada Screams,” Reneau discusses the life cycle of a cicada, of her accidental unearthing and killing of one while she was gardening. She questions her wrongness, ineptitude, and place in this world. The essay volleys between facts of the cicada, the facts of her summer after her assault, and how, ostensibly, life is just so precarious and temporary. She correlates the two by stating, “When I left school again, I began wearing oversized sweatshirts, creating an exoskeleton of my own, and started dreaming of being buried alive, forced to swallow dirt.”
In the latter half of the collection, we dive into “The Regeneration.” We continue reading about fireflies, sea sponges, jellyfish, and bats. In “The Collapsing of Hummingbirds’ Nests,” through the formation and destruction of the homes of hummingbirds and their treacherous migration patterns, Reneau explains, “I know that time and death are the only inevitables in life. I want you to know that though I am scared, I will go anywhere with you.” In “The Meaning of Sparrows,” a dream sequence depicts a man who turns his wives into frail, fragile sparrows. The women are afraid, the birds are afraid. The world is uncertain and dangerous. And yet, the women and the birds all get up, day after day, and face what is to come. These are significant details to include as they show the perpetuation of life, the forward motions in an uphill journey, and the need and want to keep trying even if failure or pain is inevitable.
This is a compact collection, coming in at only 116 pages. Typically, something of this length could be consumed in one sitting, but Reneau casts spells with her words, and the dual meanings within each essay necessitate readers to think beyond a single sitting. It requires the time after each essay to sit, process, and absorb the profundity of all the dark, light, terror, and hope of her words.
Ultimately, Reneau seems to show humans, nature, and the creatures in it are not all that different. We are all trying to survive. We are all trying to make sense of the messes we made and those that were made before us and have been left for us to deal with. By being vulnerable with her own faults and flaws, Reneau leaves a door cracked open in every essay, allowing the reader to access the sliver of hope that shines through and continues to persevere no matter what devastation has occurred or is yet to come.
NONFICTION Sensitive Creatures
By Kirsten Reneau
Belle Point Press
March 19, 2024
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