A new book offers “kinpoetics” as a praxis that expands the imaginative possibilities of kinship.

Using science and moral philosophy, this book challenges the symbolic erasure of animals in literature.

The poems invite us into stunning encounters with animal minds and lives insisting on empathy and reciprocity.

Given my long-term interest in the broad topic of animal sentience, I'm always looking for new ways to express what science and other sorts of inquiries are telling us about animal consciousness and their ability to feel what is happening to them and around them. Animal sentience isn’t science fiction, and the real question is not if sentience has evolved but why.

Because of my interests, I was thrilled to learn of Ashley Capps and Allison Titus's new poetry anthology The New Sentience: Reimagining Animal Poetry. All in all, their new book is a revelatory intervention that insists on nothing less than a transformation of how we read, write—and, therefore, treat and live alongside—other animals. Grounded in science, moral philosophy, and poetics, it offers a framework for writing animals as conscious selves rather than symbolic surrogates. Here's what Capps had to say about this seminal book.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you and your coeditor assemble the poems for The New Sentience, and how did you select the contributors? Ashley Capps: As poets who are also both vegans working for animal liberation, we’d noticed that, in Western poetry at least, animals have disproportionately functioned as symbols and props, stand-ins for human emotion and predicament rather than subjects portrayed as fully dimensional beings or protagonists in their own right.

At the same time, over the years, we had each also saved a handful of powerful animal poems that seemed to be doing something startling and important for animals, in a way that only a poem could do. And we came to realize that, despite the symbolic flattening that has long consigned animals to the margins of literature, poetry itself holds a unique and profound potential as a tool for empathic connection and can play a........

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