Sentience

Poetry that invites us to transform our sense of kinship, mutuality, and reciprocity.

With this collection, poet and artist Meredith Stricker considers questions about personhood, belonging, property, and ownership within interdependent living cultural systems. Looking beyond humans alone, she considers whether animals dream, who our relations are, what interior lives are held within words, and whether the world is truly alive to us today or if it is simply something we experience through screens. The poems track bee swarms and hazardous waste, separation walls, and diatoms. They are intently visual, aural, and spatial, tracing the dendritic forms of trees and fractal coastlines and the symmetries of biomorphic animal patterns. They highlight non-artificial, non-extractive intelligences in sharp contrast to the rise of AI. Informed by biosemiotics, SENTIENCE arises from Stricker's continuing multidisciplinary work and architectural habitat restoration in Big Sur and her performance collaborations with musicians, composers, artists, and beekeepers.