Multispecies perspectives on dementia in the poetry of Jenna Butler.

Jenna Butler's Wells (2012) is a collection of poetry in which the poet mourns the loss of her grandmother, a life-long birdwatcher who can still recognize the familiar calls of birds that she is no longer able to name due to cognitive issues associated with dementia. Treating this scenario as one that invites interpretation from a posthuman perspective, this paper conducts a close analysis that is situated at the intersection of age studies and animal studies and highlights the possibilities and the perils of linking these two fields of inquiry. Balanced on the divide between animalizing people with dementia and subordinating non-human animals to the role of backdrop to expressions of human grief, Butler's poems navigate these twinned risks through a poetry that is ornithologically alert to bird vocalizations, behaviours, and habitats. The poet's attentiveness to birds as birds resists the transcendent, anthropocentric consolations that elegy traditionally affords; at the same time, it also enables the poet to locate the persistence of her grandmother's subjectivity in her aural recognition of bird sounds, to affirm a continuing selfhood that is maintained through interaction with the more-than-human world. Butler's poems imagine dementia through a multi-species lens that frames it, not as a catastrophic loss of humanity, but as an example of the embodied vulnerability that defines human and non-human animals alike.