Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays by Amie Souza Reilly Review by Irene Cooper

Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays by Amie Souza Reilly

Review by Irene Cooper

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Publication Date: 4/22/2025

ISBN: 9781771126809

Pages: Illustrated | 194 pages

In Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays, Amie Souza Reilly pulls a quote from Lydia Davis to serve as epigraph: The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged. Two oracular quotes from Fyodor Dostoyevsky and James Baldwin appear on the page as well, but Davis’s contribution could be the Netflix logline for the limited series, complete as it is with protagonist, desire, and conflict: the home that should have been a haven for a woman and her family becomes a trap; the villains are clearly identifiable. However, in Reilly’s lived story, the author complicates the plot with deep inquiry into how the English language is bound at its roots in a systemic violence that spares no one. 

The central narrative that links the essays is what ensues after a newly married couple and their young son move into a house and immediately are stalked and harassed by their next-door neighbors, two older brothers with thwarted designs on buying the house for themselves. Around this slice of time and space, older and only partially knowable stories—about the brothers, about the ways violence and oppression have been seeded into the English language—circle and run through the urgent concerns of the speaker. 

These essays take the form of a linguistic bestiary, a curation of animals whose English-language names have morphed into metaphors for human characteristics, actions, and behavior. The author’s drawings accompany the definitions, with thumbnails of those sketches in the full bestiary at the end of the book. Illustrations are detailed and wholly non-anthropomorphic, black and white busts and portraits of the slug, swallow, bat, fly, squirrel, seal, lark, chicken, leech, louse, worm, and others.

“The English language,” Reilly writes, “like the English colonialism that spread to America, is full of brutality.” The common language is a colonizing language. She writes that although language borrows (or invents, or steals) from the animals to interpret the human story, the man-given animal names are used as verbs, which ”…refer to acts of violence, labor, or motherhood. To badger, to hawk, to bear.” 

In this book, animals are not incidental or a convenient conceit. Even as the drawings and etymologies breach the text, the author is quick to clarify: “Animals do not interrupt my story; they are the story.”

Animosity, according to etymonline, comes from Old French and in the 15th century meant “vigor, bravery,” a definition that is now obsolete, but which is perhaps an interpretation of the brothers’ regard for their own behavior, albeit delusional. Common use can and does change over time, but do vestiges of meaning persist? Does language harbor ghosts, and do they haunt? 

The particular practice in language of naming can be tender, writes Reilly, as in the way “pregnant dolphins sing to their babies in utero, and …singing becomes a way for the newborns to learn their names.” Or naming can be—has been—“[i]n racism and disability…used to brand, erase, make other, create distance, and make spectacle.” Naming both exposes and narrows. 

The collected essays roll out in ten Roman-numeral chapters, with titles including “On boundaries,” and “On performance,” recalling both the Keatsian poetic ode and Montaigne. The first chapter is the exception: “What happened.” The speaker shares that she is “a woman who often feels afraid around men,” and that the root of that fear runs deep, but that she “did not expect to feel this kind of fear in [her]new house with [her] new husband.” The fear is triggered when the two men who own the house next door stand in the family’s driveway with their arms crossed “waiting for us as if we’d broken curfew.” One of the men, when he spoke, “spoke in chaos—repetitive, jumpy, and self-congratulatory.” 

On the next page, mid-text, sits a finely drawn illustration of a badger, and below it, an encyclopedic-style entry on the etymological history of how the name of the animal has been used as metaphor:

“Badger: v. To haggle, drive a bargain. Also, to pester, to bother, to ply with repeated and irritating requests to do something. Probably an allusion to the baiting of badgers by humans. (See also fish, also clam.)”

The badgering brothers enact more than irritating requests. They impose themselves on the landscape, they stand and stare from the family’s front lawn, mark the neighborhood by strewing sticks and debris, and move a property line. At one point they trap the author and her son in the author’s car in her driveway while shouting disparaging comments about her fitness as a mother.

They openly question the author’s husband’s sexuality. 

While Reilly does not hide her terror about the three years she and her family were stalked, she does trouble the notion of victimhood. The story of the abuse of the family, by the brothers, becomes a lens through which Reilly considers multiple ways of storytelling. The brothers are villains, clearly, but as the author foreshadows in the first chapter, “Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.”

A neighbor shares some gossip about the brothers’ childhood history—their father coming home one day to find his clothes on the front lawn, rumors of one of the brothers sharing their mother’s bed, like a marriage, without the sex part. In the essay, “III: On gossip,” Reilly considers the way in which gossip can be restorative, as well as a kind of protection, especially among women. She notes, too, that gossip is often trivialized as idle chitchat among women. At its worst, gossip destroys. “This weaponization has a long history,” Reilly writes, particularly in the historical oppression and persecution of people of color. Though gossip can be malicious, Reilly offers that “gossip remains a source of protection, a means of storytelling and archive…what folklorists and anthropologists have noted is the root of story.” In passing along information, it wields real power “among people whose voices are not heard by those in power.” The gossip about the brothers does not, per se, directly warn about a particular danger, nor does it serve to engender any particular compassion in the author, but it points to a history of strangeness, is a call to wariness, and as such is a validation of Reilly’s fear, which is grossly at odds with her enculturated desire to a good and civilized neighbor. 

There is a wildness to this book that threatens to shred its taxonomic constraints as it grapples with the ethics and impact of  human communication not merely on humans, but in every interaction with and action upon this land. As the author states in the pre-pages, “A bestiary catalogs mystery.” Mystery exists in the extreme aggression—the animosity—of two men who stalk and otherwise molest their new neighbors, a family of strangers. There is mystery, and disquiet, in the amalgam of emotions and responses the speaker experiences in the course of sustained aggression, including her own impulse to inflict harm. There is mystery in what we call a haven, in what we call a cage, in the notion of ownership—of land, of  the body—in the vagaries of boundaries. “There are so many ways to write about violence.” What and where are our edges, these lyric essays ask, and what will we do, when pushed, to protect them? 

Amie Souza Reilly is a visual artist and multi-genre writer from Connecticut. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Wigleaf, HAD, The Chestnut Review, The Atticus Review, Catapult, SmokeLong Quarterly, Barren, Pidgeonholes and elsewhere. She holds an MA in English Literature from Fordham University and an MFA from Fairfield University, and is the Writer-in-Residence and Director of Writing Studies at Sacred Heart University.

Irene Cooper’s writings appear in Beloit Poetry, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, Witness, Bear Review, J Journal, Diagram, and elsewhere. She wrote the feminist noir novel Found; Committal, poet-friendly spyfy about family; spare change, finalist for the Stafford/Hall award; the collection, even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety; and the chapbook, octets. Irene teaches and lives with her people and Roxy in Oregon.

8 October 2025