"What stays with me, in the end, is how well put together Wolf Tours is: how it becomes more than merely the sum of its parts but one journey. Or, perhaps it is like a stained glass window, where various different fragments come to compose one whole. Either way, it is a beautiful book—one that echoes, resounds and orchestrates its music and message as the pages turn." —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic: Poems
Alyse Knorr’s Wolf Tours depicts a pack of sentient wolves who offer tours to humans searching for their inner wolves. There’s the bittersweet hilarity of a gift shop which sells “the feeling of seeing your mother’s face turned into a glove” alongside lessons in loping and howling (“A tapering-off howl indicates that inside you it is raining”). One of the main characters is lovelorn Rodney, a wolf guide who has much to impart but can only say “book” and “thanks”. These surreal searching poems nudge and gnaw us into a prescient view of our world. —Matthea Harvey, author of If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?
In Wolf Tours, Alyse Knorr offers an ingenious conceit for grappling with human behavior: the perspective of wolves-turned-tour-guides, whose adventure travel company renders us the observed species. To the wolves, we are mammals who “cannot differentiate between / love and a rusted mirror,” who are “wasteful . . . of death,” and who are slow to learn the language of lope and howl, nuzzle and hunt. Rodney, the female wolf tour guide, teaches participants to “identify the source of all your mourning and provide it with an occasion”; to hunt, driven by “curiosity” instead of “terror”; and to seek to know an Other (person or species) without the distortions of “praise,” “fetish,” or “guilt. What emerges from this novel-in-verse is a satire of human consumers, traveling with their yoga mats and Off bug spray, yearning for “experience” and “epiphany” but unable to discern wisdom from novelty, art from craft, or heroism from buffoonery (“On his head Daniel Boone wears the asshole of a raccoon”). Hilarious and profound, this lupine parable will leave you seeing yourself—and your own creaturely ways—more keenly, with an awareness of the death purchased at birth and our altogether limited chances for redemption. —Heather Treseler, author of Auguries & Divinations: Poems
"In Wolf Tours, Alyse Knorr gives wolves space to rein as icons of animal wisdom. They're on to us, and take on some of our capitalist habits to fool us as only wolves can. The immense intelligence, wit, and love of this poet transform wolf anthropomorphism into the savviest and most curative kinds of salesmen of reprimand. What the wolves say haunts the reader, and these wise possessions feels uncanny, bonkers, and from Source. This mansion of the mind filled with wolves hands the reader their complacent human ass on a platter each time: "We've reached out, remember, to you." —Cynthia Arrieu-King, author of The Betweens
"Into an era of technologically mediated isolation and climate grief, into landscapes that can make us feel more alienated from our animal selves than ever, bursts Alyse Knorr's tour de force Wolf Tours. Fur lush in the wind, teeth bared, eyes on the kill, this collection lopes in and reminds us to lift our snouts and howl." —Kathleen Rooney, author of Where Are the Snows
The wolf has likely been talking to us humans this whole time, but what if someone could translate their address for us? Alyse Knorr’s Wolf Tours speaks that possibility into language through poems that sing experimental and playful in their formal restraint. These post-human poems decenter us to ask what would happen if wolves were to guide people on their earth journey/what language would they even use? Fervent, studied, and sometimes strange, this book is as much a collection of poems as it is a brochure, trail guide, vision quest, how to, and humorously kind gift to charity, speaking of and not for the wolf. With tour guide Rodney and her wit and warmth, facts and FAQ answers, this study of, as Knorr calls it, the “phenomenology of wolves” could offer the planet salvation if we can learn to listen to the wolves as they remind, “The Earth was never/meant to last.” and “Didn’t we warm you in the cave/and offer you all our stories?” By the end of this fortnight tour, you’ll remember how and why we must howl and at the moon too. —Soham Patel, author of all one in the end/water—
Crawl inside the wolf body that is this BOOK. Grow comfortable with your feral appetite to “make yourself resonant,” under the night sky, on a planet where the most endangered species is that small part of yourself that remains unmonetized. Part prayer, part grief manual, part tour of the human condition, Alyse Knorr writes with the wit and ferocity and HOWL we all need to survive right now. —Andrea Rexilius, author of Sister Urn (Sidebrow Books, 2019).
