| In writing the poems in "Extinction Studies," I was thinking a lot about the simultaneous pitfalls and benefits to the notion of anthropomorphism, a vexed word that seems unavoidable when discussing writing that contends with animal life. Around the time I wrote "Phantom shiner," I read Brian Massumi's book "What Animals Teach Us About Politics" and I remember thinking a lot about this quote: "a human-becoming bird, for example, does not invade the nest, like a cuckoo. The potential actions are purely played, unframed and thus without assignable limits." It is my hope that the voice animating "Phantom shiner" embodies these unframed and unassignable limits. | 
