Joe Rosenblatt delights in revealing a fantastical hidden world of ravenous monsters and rapacious critters of all sorts—one in which ‘either you’re the eater, or the one who’ll be consumed’.
In Bite Me!, idiosyncratic observations and provocative musings illuminate an unseen world of creatures both real and imagined.
This is a collection populated by eighty-foot-long boa constrictors and carnivorous pitcher plants. Of colossal clams that inhale noxious volcanic fumes and of bioluminescent ocean-dwelling critters that appear as ghostly mermaids to unsuspecting submariners. It is a collection in which the unfortunate Monster Boy copes with the consequences of schoolyard bullying—and flesh-liquefying stomach acid—while the agoraphobic Birdman ‘strives to ascend skyward’ though he is permanently grounded.
The poems and musings in Bite Me! are interested in ‘the bizarre side of Mother Nature’s handiwork’, from the depths of the ocean to the wilds of the tropical rainforest ... to the cozy hearth of the domesticated housecat. In this collection characterized by isolation and unquenchable need, Rosenblatt celebrates life in all its varied forms while awaiting that moment when ‘time drifting as a bottom feeder makes a meal of us’.