Cooley conducts a chorus of "clucks & barks & muffled cries" to unconstrained cacophony. Bursting with a remarkable and encompassing cast of spiders and fish, crows and bears, rats, chickens, and cows, The Bestiary gives free rein to very human feelings and the way they grow, stunt, and stampede out on the prairie landscape. Amid hushed and howling moments, the natural bends uncanny while the extraordinary roots into the organic under Cooley's careful eye.

Dennis Cooley grew up in Estevan, Saskatchewan, and attended the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Rochester. He is an active member of the writing community in Winnipeg and teaches at St. John’s College, University of Manitoba. His latest book of poetry is the bentleys (2006).

Nicole Markotić is a poet and critic who teaches at the University of Windsor and edits the chapbook publication Wrinkle Press. She has published two poetry books, Connect the Dots and Minotaurs & Other Alphabets, as well as a fictional biography of Alexander Graham Bell, Yellow Pages. She is currently completing a novel.

Dennis Cooley's profile page

There are other tongues apart from our mother tongues that influence how we understand language, the sounds breathed by the lungs of beasts in the field and sung from the mouths of beasts on the wing. Dennis Cooley speaks in those tongues, animal and human, rendering them with poems about eight-eyed charlatans and black-beaked hucksters. The Bestiary is a Naturalis Mysteria, an encyclopedia of mysteries discovered in an uncanny land by Pliny of these prairies. It is a meta-Metamorphoses, a translation of myths uncovered in an unreliable library by our postmodern Ovid.
- Nathan Dueck, A Very Special Episode

The world shines with life, with mystery, animated by animals, and in The Bestiary Cooley gives voice to it all. Compressing coal-black crows to diamond, Cooley crafts jewelled lines.
-Jonathan Ball, The National Gallery

Filled with owlish wisdom, this bestiary hovers, swoops, and tilt-wings, as the crow flies, over the contours of a prairie and its species unique to Dennis Cooley, his tender observations, his wild surmise.
-Aritha van Herk