Review: Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties by Suzanne Roberts

Reviewed by Cal Olson

Travel writer and poet Suzanne Roberts’s newest book, Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties, explores what we do and who we are in the face of grief: How do we reorient after tragedy destabilizes us? What do we do when  there is no way to shield ourselves, our loved ones, from pain? How do we find hope for a future in this world full of darkness, death, and disaster?  

This series of somewhat-linear essays opens with a line by the author’s close friend, poet Ilyse Kusnetz: “Wait for us on the sands, knowing / time is a rope, a deck of cards, an empty glass.” It is this friend’s death that spurs Roberts’s journey through several personal tragedies—the loss of her father at twenty-four, a pregnancy and abortion in that same year.

Roberts’s descriptions are unflinchingly honest and evocative. In “The Same Story,” she says, “If this were fiction, I could not tell you that on the day of the abortion, the clouds rumbled in, pleat after gray pleat, the sky coughed with thunder, dead leaves circled in wind funnels. Or that lightning cracked open the sky. It would be too obvious, heavy-handed. But it is true.” This theme follows us throughout the text as Roberts is raw and honest in her personal stories.  

In “A Love Letter to my Hometown After the Shooting,” Roberts recalls returning to Thousand Oaks, California, to care for her dying mother. Her ordinary suburban experiences—trips to the roller rink, oak trees, car dealerships, a first kiss in a mall parking lot—become imaginative touchstones that echo my own memories of adolescence in Omaha, Nebraska. Her individual grief coaxed my own local tragedies to the surface.

December 5, 2007: Robert Hawkins entered the Von Maur at Westroads Mall and killed nine people, including himself. I think of how eerie it felt walking through that store even years later, soft piano playing in the background, middle-aged women flooding the clearance section, teenagers sipping Starbucks on the escalator.

January 5, 2010: Millard South High School, my sophomore year. Robert Butler shot and killed our assistant principal, Vicki Kasper. Critically injured Curtis Case, our principal. And then fled, driving two miles away down 132nd Street to where my brother was working at AAA. Butler turned the gun on himself, then. He was seventeen. My brother says he saw police cars surrounding the vehicle when he left for his lunch break.

Roberts’s message that the illusion of suburban safety has shattered is clear, sharp, urgent, and personal. Two mass shootings occurred the week I drafted this review. One of them, at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, is the deadliest since Sandy Hook. These tragedies occur in sleepy towns just like our own, disrupt (and end) real lives.

In other chapters, the author sits with the reader in the unresolved mix of ecological grief and the seeming collapse of the world around us. She grieves over meat dogs in Vietnam, burned fields, acres of chopped down trees, captive animals used to entertain tourists—as well as her own role in it all. Roberts confronts several difficult decisions here: Whether to give a tip to the young girl whose job it is to shove a terrified sloth into tourists’ arms. Determining the correct time to put her sick dog down.

It is as though Roberts has prodded a leg that I didn’t realize had gone numb, the pins and needles spreading as I reawaken to issues COVID-19 has overshadowed. The US still has a gun problem. Impending climate disaster looms. Children everywhere are exploited, harmed, and in need of protecting. Among heartbreak, loss, and the impermanence of love and life, the world still turns, and we are here. We must live anyway.

Roberts reflects with refreshing and vindicating nuance:

“[I] then wonder at how my moral compass was so much clearer when I was a child, when the world easily divided into right and wrong. But I do not want to think like a child, ignoring the ambiguities of this life, the way I can love animals and still eat them. Pigs and cows have been domesticated for more than ten thousand years. And over those years I join those who have struggled with the ways my own animal nature means I am a mammal who eats other mammals.”

I found myself most drawn to reflections such as this, perhaps because they grounded and comforted me among all the tragedy and pain Roberts explores. Or perhaps because of the reminder that I am not the only one struggling to navigate this dying world, this collective grief, this burden of consciousness.  

How to manage this, our human and animal natures? Roberts doesn’t claim to know the answer. But she does shine a light on the shared pieces of our trauma, our shared pain. And she does draw us toward the light, remind us that our animal nature connects us to something much, much larger—a complexity (and a power) that we are ill equipped to understand, but is within us still, for better or worse.

Cal Olson is a nonbinary writer currently residing in Austin, TX. They graduated with their MA in English from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where they were awarded the John J. McKenna fellowship in Creative Nonfiction and the Dr. Susan Naramore Maher Scholarship for best Graduate Research Essay. When not teaching, Cal has been working on a perceptual dialectology study investigating the way Nebraskans think of the speech of other Nebraskans. They also enjoy rock climbing, craft beer, and hanging out with their cats. You can find Cal’s work in Omaha Magazine and The Linden Review.