Since the publication of We Weep for Our Strangeness in 1969, Dennis Schmitz has been widely praised and admired as one of our most original and fearless American poets. Animism finds him at his surprising, wry, elegantly layered, and brilliantly crafted best. The world of Schmitz’s poems is deeply, vividly physical, intense in its sense perception and detail, yet also ultimately spiritual, affirming the presence of divinity and spirit in the most unlikely places and things. We learn as we go, along with the poet, about death, about desire, about our relation to the non-human world—in short, about the things that truly matter.