I WAS

An invitation to contemplate what animal skulls can reveal about their previous users’ senses and behaviors.

Donovan’s carefully detailed skulls, most placed on the ground in outdoorsy settings, make it easy to follow Hocker’s beautifully penned poetic references (“I tasted bark, then heartwood / heard sticks snap as the tree fell”). In the backmatter, readers will find more expansive descriptions of what the size and placement of these skulls’ “arches and ridges and caverns of bone” might suggest about the eyes, noses, and diets of the six once-living creatures, from lynx to hummingbird, that appear in the flesh on alternating spreads. There’s also a seventh bony image here: human, with major parts labeled, following earlier views of young observers with brown skin intact and their crania still protecting minds able to think and discover. (The author’s remark that “you can learn your father’s language and your grandmother’s too” obliquely hints at Native American roots for at least one of the children.) The ontological title, which does double duty as a running refrain, encourages more philosophical reflection, as does a closing claim that “just like you,” animals also have “thoughts and memories, curiosity, intelligence, and consciousness.”

Heady lessons in reasoning from evidence, with food for deeper thought.