Emily Vanderploeg’s first full-length collection is an elegantly fashioned contemplation upon language, identity, and familial history. A collection mainly consisting of lyric-poems, Vanderploeg’s travels from childhood to strange cities and stranger cities still is unexpectedly sharp in their reflections. As Isobel Roach states in her review Strange Animals ‘offers its readers a glimpse of a resilient world in bloom.’

“The places and times are so beautifully realised, and the stories are so personal, that you’re quite eagerly following along this bizarre kind of crazy paving journey[…] And there’s a lovely warmth and humour as well as all the longing and the heartbreak that inevitably comes from travel and romance […]and includes a tarot reading at the back! What more could you ask for?”

"Canadian-born poet Emily Vanderploeg’s first full collection, Strange Animals, is a beautifully crafted rumination on identity, ancestry, and the environments that make us who we are. Beginning with a focus on journeys through nature – both real and spiritual – Vanderploeg’s form of poetic ‘Orienteering’ is a kind of divination."

"Idealism, loss and hope are themes that run throughout this book, with an overall tone that is, like topics in these poems of oranges and paper cuts, sweet, sharp, and pithy."