No More Animal Poems
AUTHOR
Marc Vincenz
No More Animal Poems reimagines eco-poetry, forking up what might be called “cosmic cli-po”: climate poems that look beyond a single damaged planet to a whole energetic multiverse. Playfully casting his “eye/I,” Vincenz writes from an ever-vanishing now where climates have gone rogue, timelines are wobbly, and humans are still making things worse. Welcome to 2026, where the Anthropocene is overheating, biodiversity is declining, extinctions keep ticking along, and governments continue to treat fossil fuels like a comfort food they just can’t quit.
The poems range widely across ecological crises, vanishing habitats, and endangered species, but their exacting focus is often on us—our greed, our blinkered optimism, and our striking ability to justify almost anything. Structurally, the book is served as a menu, or perhaps a dystopian omakase, with each poem arriving as a course. These darkly comic gastronomies champion the non-human while skewering our contemporary eating habits, from trendy veganism to luxury food cultures obsessed with scarcity, exclusivity, and status. The result is smart, savage, and funny—a tasting menu designed to make you think, laugh, wonder, dream, create, rebel.
As things fall apart, our sense of a secure future recedes. Riven by a cascade of crises, our sense of meaning and purpose grows unstable. In such a moment, poetry becomes elegy and entreaty, beacon and pathway. No More Animal Poems fuses wit and urgency to map a world where life is vanishing faster than our excuses. Relentless, inventive, and darkly funny, writing toward what is vanishing or already gone, rendering it with pithy, aching precision, Vincenz compels us to confront what our empty pleasures are costing us and the rest of the planet.
No More Animal Poems will also be available as an audiobook performed by the author, and is accompanied by a neo-progressive, ambient-folk-funk and spoken-word album, No More Animal Songs, performed by Marc Vincenz and the Supersonic Orchestra. The first single, “Swell,” will be released in April, 2026.
Reviews
“There’s nothing quite like No More Animal Poems anywhere. Marc Vincenz is an absolute master of the innovative and fantastical prose poem. What’s so vital about this work is that it so wryly exposes the brute facts of consumption and the fetishization of animals (for eating and amusement) and takes us into the grit of the longer-term issues around how we’ve reached such grotesque levels of species loss and the destruction of (all) habitat/s. No More Animal Poems is a unique, multilayered, lyrical, nuanced, and necessary testament to this ecological crisis.”
—John Kinsella, eco-activist, poet, and novelist
“Of the many thought-provoking books that Marc Vincenz has authored, No More Animal Poems is perhaps his most electrifying…a most urgent call for our environment and humanity. This book is a cosmic womb, where sounds of celestial radiation, carousel, zither, spoon, tin whistle, eel, frog, roost, chimpanzee, twin…all entangle and surface from our subconscious. No More Animal Poems ‘can’t promise you can reach the other end,’ but if you pay attention, you might go ‘deeper than you could [ever] imagine.’ ‘And don’t forget the witches,’ says Marc Vincenz: witches like the poets William Blake, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, and…Marc Vincenz, whose visions hold onto a last kernel of humanity to keep this world living on.”
—Wang Ping, eco-activist, poet, and novelist
“No More Animal Poems is a powerful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking book that addresses our environmental crisis from many varied perspectives. Every page compelled me—forced me, really—to consider our planet and our role on it as humans, in new, sometimes inspiring, often frightening, yet always imaginative ways.”
—Adil Najam, President of WWF and Professor of International Relations and Earth & Environment at Boston University
“The poetry in No More Animal Poems speaks not only for the poet, but for the animal world in exposing human hypocrisy. It also speaks for the urgent need to change and reassess our priorities, reminding the reader that ‘we eat / away the clouds, the shrinking shores, eat away / all those beavers and bears, those tireless, treeless squirrels, / leaping bush to bush in their great expectations.’”
—Cassandra Atherton, from the Introduction
“In No More Animal Poems, Marc Vincenz has risen to the imperative of creating the single most compelling poetry volume amid a considerable body of writing on this topic. Persuasively broaching painfully difficult subject matter, Vincenz displays at every turn a remarkable deftness graced by wit, elegance, and even humor, when showcasing the exploits of the inhuman human lust for power. Noting that: ‘It takes more than / one rubber tree to make / a single ball bounce.’ Vincenz reminds the reader ‘We are not alone on this planet.’ The inevitable unspoken question becomes: Is such aloneness the goal of those senselessly ravaging the sacred earth? I approached this book as a novice on the particulars of what I learned from Marc Vincenz in this life-changing book and find myself inspired by the sheer power and virtuosity to engage in kind.”
—Sheila E. Murphy, poet, writer, and visual artist
“No More Animal Poems packs an uncanny power to stimulate a reader’s alertness to the valence of words and allusions. Vincenz has absorbed a host of belles lettres, lettres de cachet, and lettres scandaleuses, a wealth of imagistic modes, and troves of data. Working among these, he has captured a meta-myth of our tangled (“We were all entangled in tangles”) times. All readers will find their nerve endings stimulated. Some nerves will signal Ovid, some may signal Max Ernst, others Samuel Beckett. What Vincenz has achieved with this book is a work of experimental literature in the true spirit and substance of literary performance in alliance with scientific discourse. The book’s title is itself a paradox, since the volume includes a menagerie of elegant poems about animals actual and imaginary. These poems express what will go missing from the world if we fail of imagination and generosity to all things living.”
—Dan Campion, poet and essayist
“No More Animal Poems is a collection that speaks not only to the fate of animals (and of course animals R us) in our barbarous civilization (barbarism and civilization usually posed as opposites but in our time, they have fused), but to the fate of humanity itself. The texts (alternating between line-break poems, passages of fiction, and fairy tale) are funny, sad, angry, and often philosophically mind-blowing. The organizing framework of a menu is so telling on the meta level alone (capitalism’s all-consuming maw). As Vincenz shows here, the tragedy of the animals is also crucially a human tragedy, as the injustice we visit on animals is internalized and incorporated into our relations to each other. This collection spans realism and fabulism, merging the two modes to great effect. But there’s also an aspect of “documentary poetry,” a concept that's had some play recently (as in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!). The lengthy extinction list at the end of the book is just soul-crushing. This is a book that is keyed to the tenor of our time—the Anthropocene—where the writing whirls through a full orchestra of poetic registers. Marc Vincenz has proven, if proof were needed, that poets are always the first responders to the scale and import of planetary crisis. This book needs to travel far and wide.”
—Andrew Joron, poet and novelist
Marc Vincenz is a multi-lingual poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, musician, and artist. He has published over fifty books of poetry, fiction, and translation. His recent poetry collections include The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, Spells for the Wicked, All the Tricks of Language, and IRØNCLAD. Vincenz’s translation of prize-winning Swiss poet and novelist Klaus Merz’s An Audible Blue received the 2023 Massachusetts Book Prize for Translated Literature.
Publishing editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing, Vincenz lives in Western Massachusetts.