Teaching Notes for Exellent Evidence of Human Activity:
Use in the classroom to discuss: segmented narratives; internal structures; the death drive; personal reflection; survival amid extinction events; apocalypses; destructive actions; poetic/economical language; lyrical writing; final sentences/lines; urgency; individual humans and the environment; climate change; grief narratives; colony collapse; the pain scale; teeth; taxidermy; memory; insect life; "America"; buffalo.

Pairs well with Last Days of the Microsaurs, Surviving in Drought, The Hand Implements.

Excellent Evidence of Human Activity by Sara Ryan

$10.00

56 pages.

Perfect bound.

Earthworks that hold no water. Swarms of nothing sweet. Teeth and the stink of saline. Bee stings. Buffalo gore. Butterflies dead in a box. This is the material of the Anthropocene. This is Excellent Evidence of Human Activity. Winner of The Cupboard Pamphlet’s 2018 Annual Contest, Sara Ryan’s Excellent Evidence of Human Activity is an urgent, elegiac rumination on environmental impact, unsalvageable animals, and pain. Our appetites exceed the world. Our consequences gather like bees. Let us look directly at all that we have done.
Excellent Evidence of Human Activity is a lyrically taut meditation on pain, the natural world, and above all, mortality. The narrator writes of sharp teeth, bee stingers, a knife through a turtle's back. Penetration in this world is suffering. Still, the reflections on pain and mortality exhibit something else: to feel pain is to live. Written in eleven short segments, the language in Excellent Evidence of Human Activity carries the rhythm of poetry as the narrative unfolds into a stunning finale.

—Kelly Sundberg, author of Goodbye, Sweet Girl

Sara Ryan's Excellent Evidence of Human Activity is a gorgeous and fearful exploration of life at the end of the Anthropocene. Ryan's lyric essays range from pigeons to the nature of time to the endangerment of bees and bison and their relationships to humans. Although we are makers of our own extinction and taking other species down with us, these essays make the news of our world wondrous. Our planet has a devastating kind of magic, and I am glad Ryan has chronicled it, from its taxidermied past to its aging now.

—Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade

Excellent Evidence of Human Activity by Sara Ryan

Volume 38

About the Author

Praise for Excellent Evidence of Human Activity