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 crucial role in helping reshape human-animal relations. How we write about animals, how they’re represented in our poems and stories, not only reflects how we relate to them in the larger world—it also shapes how we treat them. Thus, any shift in how we perceive and treat other animals necessarily involves a shift in how we read and write about them. Poets, we believe, are among those who hold the key.

As a genre less subject to normative grammar conventions and expectations, poetry can function as a mode of language that is not just liberated but is itself liberating. Through “defamiliarizing” devices, poetry can disrupt automatic, unconscious thinking—a category of thought in which our limited, one-dimensional conception of “the animal” clearly participates—and help us perceive anew the things and beings of this world that we have become numb to and ceased to consider.

We were actively reading and looking for these poems since 2010. The pieces we included are true outliers in the tradition of animal poetry and powerfully demonstrate how poetry can serve as a singular bridge between species, facilitating encounters with animal experiences and perspectives in ways that resist erasure.

MB: What are some of the topics you consider, and what are some of your major messages?

AC: The title of our anthology, The New Sentience, is a nod to two events. It gestures toward the poetry manifesto The New Sentence, published in 1987 by poet Ron Silliman, which described the emergence of a new type of experimental poetry in which the sentence was liberated from conventional narrative techniques, resisting readymade modes of meaning, and mining instead “the hidden capacities of the blank space between words and sentences.”

It also refers to a recent re-visioning and understanding of animal sentience, with “sentience” defined as the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively—including the ability to experience pleasure and suffering.

Historically, animals in Western literature have themselves constituted a blank space. Even when presented as the ostensible subject of a poem or story, animals have overwhelmingly functioned as symbols, metaphors, and props—a tabula rasa onto which to project our human dramas, or they have figured as so much anonymous, nostalgic scenery embellishing the backdrop.

Of course, poetry is the domain of symbols, of one thing standing for another, and metaphor can be world-building. But if the primary way that animals feature in poems is symbolic, then eventually poetry becomes complicit in their larger diminishment. The backgrounding of animals, even in writing that purports to be about them, entrenches their disappearance in our world, from species extinctions to the endless, hidden exterminations happening daily on slaughterhouse killing floors.Thankfully, the long unchallenged view of nonhuman animals as un-self-aware, unthinking, unsuffering, and unemotional has been discarded by the scientific community, with multiple teams of international neuroscientists issuing landmark “Declarations on Consciousness," affirming sentience and self-awareness in all vertebrates and many invertebrates, including crustaceans and insects.

As interdisciplinary scholarship advances our understanding of the experiential life of nonhuman animals, poetry becomes a vital tool for rehabilitating the literary blank space of the animal with a “new sentence” that meaningfully includes the animal “I,” engaging animals as autonomous individuals and emotional subjects.

MB: How does your work differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?

AC: Although the field of ecoliterature is now well known, there has not, to our knowledge, been an anthology of ecopoetry or animal poetry that has explicitly acknowledged animal sentience and subjectivity or animal liberation as core orientations.

MB: What are your biggest hopes for this book?

AC: When I consider the miraculous odds and the irrepeatable cosmic cascade necessary to instantiate a single life, it is abundantly inferable that liberation is the existential birthright of every sentient being, as much and as surely as it is our own.

We are incoherent in our failure to recognize that the freedom and autonomy we consecrate as fundamentally inviolable to human existence have their foundation in a notion that unavoidably extends to other animals, too: that naturally and morally, a body and a life can never be the property of another. That we desecrate the very nature of existence by treating our fellow beings as property and commodities.

It is our hope this book will play some part in helping people understand that other animals, like us, are conscious creatures with individual feelings, personalities, and preferences, with their own singular joys, sorrows, loves, sufferings, and strivings for self-determination that matter to them regardless of their perceived importance to others.

We hope this book helps people recognize, and honor, that, like us—as Mary Oliver writes in her poem, “Clam”— other animals each “have a muscle that loves/ being alive,” and that, like us, too, “they also try very hard not to die.”

And we hope to inspire other poets and writers to a more compassionate, meaningful engagement with animal subjects, one that explores animal life with respect, curiosity, empathy, humility, and a sense of kinship.

In conversation with Ashley Capps, author of Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields. The recipient of fellowships from the Iowa Arts Council, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the National Endowment for the Arts, she works as a writer, editor, and researcher for the nonprofits Free from Harm and A Well-Fed World. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

Bekoff M., Animal Consciousness: Behavioral Flexibility Is Ubiquitous, Psychology Today. March 2, 2026. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/202603/animal-c…

Bekoff M., It's Time to Celebrate Animal Sentience and Stop Squabbling. Psychology Today. March 1, 2026. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/202601/its-time…

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