Introduction by Ingrid Wendt
Cover art by Stephanie Taylor
Book 3 of 5, TrenchArt Material Series
Poetry | $15.00
ISBN: 0-9766371-2-X
Size: 9.25″ X 4.25″
Pages: 80
Binding: Paper

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Pam Ore’s Grammar of the Cage is a startling first collection of poetry: lyrical in tone and language, philosophical in scope, scientific in observation, and heartbreaking in the imagery of what’s been left. These are poems of nature and ecology from a former zookeeper and, as poet Ingrid Wendt says, “a truly unique poetic voice.” Ore breaks open Nature’s physical and literary remnants, wondering who and what we are, and how language shapes and constrains our behaviors with the environment.

Praise for Grammar of the Cage

“Pam Ore’s Grammar of the Cage invites us to participate in a disturbing perspective, the voice of a witness calling readers to unflinchingly grapple with hard questions about the relationship between humans and animals. The deepest truth of these poems resides in the question Ore asks about the danger of being the observer and the reporter. What happens if language itself fails? I have found this book of poems to be haunting but necessary. It is a stunning debut collection.”

— Eloise Klein Healy, author of Passing

“As with Emily Dickinson, Ore’s ‘business’ is ‘to sing.’ And sing she does.”

—Ingrid Wendt, author of Singing the Mozart Requiem

“There is variety. The bane of many chapbooks is a relentless sameness of tone. Ore in ‘Pop Quiz’ invites the reader to join her in play, to see what words really are if you must look at them as if you had never seen them before.”

–Read complete review at The Compulsive Reader

Grammar of the Cage is an ambitious effort for its generous inclusion of disparate styles and its expeditions into the realm of the undisclosed minds that linger solely within the animal world…”

— The Great American Pinup