Wet Specimen - Paperback

"I wish I could be little again reading in my mother's lap, watching the koi make their circuitous routes,

pumping the heart of the pond as if stuffed and hot with blood."

Abigail Raley's Wet Specimen is a poetry collection dedicated to celebrating sensuality, tenderness, and the rewilding of the self. In her debut collection, Raley curates a portrait of desire that moves through ecoscapes, homescapes, and genderscapes. Lush with surreal metaphors and fiercely devoted to a corporeal lexicon, these poems echo slick humor while protesting gendered power dynamics. Through prose poems, free verse, and pantoums, Wet Specimen interrogates the primal capacity to want, to hate, and to love. Raley's inventive poems resist rigidity in favor of play, eroticism, and embodied discovery. Attentive to sickness, animals, love, and gender, Wet Specimen revels in a profound wonder of flesh, pus, and lust, encouraging the merging of self and body with the natural world.