Sundress Reads: Review of Consider the Rooster

In Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, 2024), Oliver Baez Bendorf sounds the alarm with grace. His latest collection is a stunning physical artifact—over twice the size of a typical poetry book in both thickness and width—welcoming readers to sit still, read slowly, and pay close attention. Baez brilliantly weaves together personal excavations with cultural mythology and an honored relationship with the natural world in unexpected and satisfying ways on every page.

With the opening poem, “Colony Collapse,” Bendorf quickly situates the collection in a larger queer ecopoetic discourse. The speaker is direct and loving in the aftermath of suffering—and in the midst of healing—drawing attention to the land:

The mostly lower-case stylizing gives Bendorf’s writing an intimate, even whispered tone. The speaker here is dismantling, renewing themself, even enjoying what they can. “Colony Collapse” ends with a simple invitation: “soup’s on” (Bendorf 3). Here he signals the poem (and entire book’s) purpose as invitation, as storyteller beckoning you to sit at the table and to listen.

Throughout Consider the Rooster, Bendorf offers wise reflections on gender that conflate with the concepts of time, faith, and ecology. In “I Just Chose My Place and Let the Circle Form Around Me,” he frees his speaker’s mind to ruminate:

The non-linear quality of queerness and being transgender is stunning, and completely outside human-made/heteronormative time. This is a marvel to behold and live out. Throughout Consider the Rooster, Bendorf often humbly turns to the vast mystery and holiness of outer space to try to articulate the gift of queerness.

In other moments, Bendorf turns to the hyper-specificity of flora and fauna, close to the earth, grounding his poems in truth. “Expanding the Encounter,” for example, situates readers to a commonplace suburban scene to face the intimidating topic of death together. Bendorf writes of plucking dandelions, a “juvenile rabbit dead in the middle / of the footpath bugs now feeding,” and “fur-flecked / coyote scat” (49). These flowers and animals, though often unnoticed and disregarded, frequent countless neighborhoods in America. They try to survive the same way humans do.

Bendorf’s writing reminds us that we are all connected—by faith (whatever that may be), by nature, by a shared humanity—expanding ecopoetics as a genre. As a queer poet myself, I find so much hope in his intellect and reflection, in lines like: “But I also / love the jonquils I waited for all winter, / each one an orange candle, another wish. / For all I’ve missed. For everything to come” (Bendorf 29). When so many weaponize biology against the validation of queerness, Bendorf creates space for queer people to explore themselves through the world around them. His work more broadly pushes back against “man vs. nature” dichotomies, challenging the easy notion that nature is ‘out there’ while we are ‘here.’ In “Clairvoyance,” the final poem in Consider the Rooster, the speaker addresses aspen trees with eyes drawn on their trunks by “some god” (Bendorf 100). The speaker then reflects, even looping in the reader to emphasize our interconnectedness:

Queerness and clairvoyance are inextricably tied, as the latter is defined by writer Natalie Adler as “the ability to see beyond the immediate into another time and place, to the then and there. To see clearly is to see how things truly are.” Bendorf ends the collection with a poem about seeing, truly expanding a reader’s imagination of what’s possible by inviting them to witness. In the English language, we say ‘I feel so seen’ and ‘I feel so heard’ when we feel acknowledged, respected, and in community. And I feel so grateful to know this poem, to sit with Bendorf’s speaker and the trees and the future, full of hope from new beginnings and poetry.

Consider the Rooster is visionary and nurturing, both a journey and a safe place to rest. Bendorf is urgent and humble, welcoming readers to consider—an act at risk from technologies creeping in on our collective and individual psyches, offering to expediently do our critical thinking and dreaming for us. Bendorf encourages us to lay flowers for the dead, to keep our heads up, alert, to “remember everything,” and “regret nothing” (Bendorf 5).

Consider the Rooster is available from Nightboat Books

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Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Honey in My Hair. She has earned a Writers’ Room of Boston Poetry Fellowship and later served on their Board. She is the winner of Breakwater Review‘s 2022 Peseroff Prize, an Academy of American Poets 2020 University Prize, and most recently earned Second Place in The Room Magazine‘s 2023 Poetry Contest. Her writing can be found in Gasher, Solstice Lit, Thrush, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. After earning her MFA, she now teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.