A Review of Hadara Bar-Nadav’s The Animal is Chemical

The “parasite” in the titular poem that haunts Hadara Bar-Nadav’s The Animal Is Chemical, selected by Jericho Brown as the winner of the 2022 Levis Prize in Poetry from Four Way Books, is no animal. It’s not even human. The “sick” and “CARNIVOROUS” infestation that urges to “keep families / in / a controlled room” since “[c]hildren / must be fully consumed / during the hunting season” is more than an ailment of the body. It is a fever in the mind consumed by the book’s dual themes of family history of the Holocaust and the pharmaceuticals used to treat the physical and psychological symptoms related to that inheritance.