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Bear Country

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Bear Country
I just re-read "Adam in the Wilderness" and "Fur Trade," two of the poems in Dana Sonnenschein's amazing collection *Bear Country*. I had to go back for more, the same way we keep going back to haunted houses, or wanting to hear terrible, frightening stories, or pitiful ones. That's where we live, that's where we are.

In these poems Sonnenschein mines historic events and a deep knowledge of the natural world. Encounters with the wild, with bears and other people, with the possibility of sudden honest violence, or with the sad, degraded and explosive residue left when wildness is half-tamed and put on display (think P.T. Barnum's dancing bears, dressed in ladies clothes) are Sonnenschein's subject. In these encounters, individual human beings lose. Scalps are loosened, bones broken. But in the Big Encounter, bears lose. Have lost. This collection summons the terror of those encounters, and the sadness and inevitability of the outcome. Read it.