Quinn Latimer was born in 1978 in Venice, California, and educated at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University's School of the Arts in New York. Her poems have been featured in Boston Review, The Paris Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals. She currently lives with her husband in Basel, Switzerland, where she regularly contributes criticism about contemporary art and literature to Artforum, Frieze, and Kaleidoscope. Rumored Animals, which was awarded the 2010 American Poetry Journal Book Prize, is her first book. (Author photo by Sophie Jung)
"Readers of new poetry have come to expect a certain amount of wonder in the work, a certain receptivity (here and there) to the non-rational, preternatural undercurrents which ordinarily reveal themselves to us with full force only every now and then. For some, poetry might even serve, in part, as a conservancy for that receptivity, a protected place for it to run free beyond the reach of all the paperwork and chatter. Rumored Animals is one such place. By turns ecstatic and grief-stricken, Quinn Latimer's poems—distinctive, audacious, elemental, and unyielding—render the world with all its strangenesses intact and vitality restored, asserting the legitimacy of another, more primal vision at odds with the agreed-upon, one where 'mountains/ surround us with their animal/ prowl, throw back// their black capes/ and are done.' This is a thrilling, defiant, and heartening body of work."
—Timothy Donnelly
"In her debut, Latimer draws on sources from contemporary photography and art—Diane Arbus, Francesca Woodman, Donald Judd—to develop a complex engagement with constructions of self and prevailing cultural determinations of the female and feminine. In rich, robust sounds and rhythms, the poet strives to recognize herself within surface and image . . . Negotiating contradictory urges to conceal and reveal identity, Latimer allows a quiet refusal to come fully into view. This is an impressive debut."
—Publishers Weekly
Dream Horse Press
