The Universe is an Animal

Jessica Mookherjee’s The Universe is an Animal is a remarkable collection: fierce, tender and endlessly curious. These are poems of inheritance, love, loss and survival, alive to both the intimate and the elemental. I loved it.

-- Luke Wright

In poems as delicate, yet resilient, as the charged imagery of waterlilies blooming throughout this collection, Jessica Mookherjee explores her universe as a living, breathing, entity. In The Universe is an Animal Mookherjee casts her ‘khol black eyes’ on histories and geographies, from pop culture and the minutia and into their global resonances.

-- Karen Downs-Barton

Mookherjee’s collection The Universe Is an Animal explores bodies and wounds, grief and infertility, partition and inherited upheaval. Bearing witness to the fragility and frailty of life, these poems trace the tender torment of loss: a broken country, fractured borders, the displacement of families, and the violence visited upon women’s bodies. From civil war to the hospital ward, from weaponised language to the brutality of erasure, Mookherjee writes into a silenced history, centring the complicated female body as a site of wounds and resistance. This is both homage and honouring, holding space for truth, tenderness and a strange love that blossoms like waterlilies amidst devastation.

-- Malika Booker

Mookherjee's world is a collision of cultures that re-arranges itself with precision and care, turning the complex and painful into something other - a new lush space in which to take a breath and contemplate our histories and surrounded by our ancestor's ghosts, decide whether we can forgive, let alone forget.

-- Sascha Akhtar

‘Jessica Mookherjee's poems combine power and delicacy, often held together in the same poem, the same stanza, the same line. I am struck by the richness of her voice, the depth and range of her concerns – her ability to explore roots and uprooting, and to write as if all the tenses were connected and flowed into and out of each other. As she puts in one of her poem-titles: The Past has yet to leave. For all the complexity of this book’s emotions, for all the movement and cosmpolitanism of the poems, Mookherjee's lines are never less than crafted and their effects controlled. Their feelings ring true, in poem after poem.’

-- Patrick McGuin