Heard about the fish that clean shark teeth? Or the frog that lives with a tarantula? Welcome to the weird world of symbiosis—where animals form incredible relationships. Macken Murphy, host of the popular animal podcast Species, introduces his favourite symbiotic relationships in his first kids’ nonfiction book, Animal Sidekicks. Along the way he explains the cool science behind the baffling behaviour of some animals—from friendly alliances to pesky parasites. Alongside him, illustrator Dragan Kordic skillfully brings to life head-scratching relationships in nature, including: • The crab that wears a sea urchin as a hat • The bat that goes to bed inside a plant • The warthog that likes a mongoose massage You’ll even find out about symbiotic relationships including YOU! (Hint—is your head ever itchy?) By the end of the book you won’t look at nature in the same way again!

Poetry. Jewish Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. The narrators in THE ANIMAL AT YOUR SIDE scavenge for clues, trying to stitch together a life in the midst of unrootedness. Finding bones, talismans, and half-heard voices that portal back to both personal and collective history, the speakers are haunted by diaspora, family estrangement, intergenerational trauma, and resilience. What are the costs of being far away from a homeplace? What are the costs of returning? And when the costs are too high on both sides, how do you choose? Grieving the loss of family of origin, and longing to return, the narrators forge new shapes, grounded in a connection to the natural world, ultimately making a home in their own unsettled natures. These poems play with form and structure, ranging from tightly-wound lyrics to detailed reportage. Alpert uses white space and invents forms as needed, creating sunken stanzas and a poem shaped like a rib cage. By turns gritty, frank, and devotional, THE ANIMAL AT YOUR SIDE finds things to be treasured in weirdness, queerness, the ecstatic, and the erotic. It is a book for anyone who has ever been lost, who has waited for what seemed like too long "for the voices/to filter back." "THE ANIMAL AT YOUR SIDE spans worlds--Eastern Europe, China, Ecuador, folktale, and myth--all of these worlds equally sinister and haunting. In poems where we feel 'the whirr-click of war beginning...' the poet learns that the best way to survive is to become 'the same color as rocks, water, / anything I walked past, / see-through.' This is Megan Alpert's gift to us--radical empathy--so we can shape-shift through these worlds as she has. This is a collection I'll read time and again, and I know I will grow with each reading."--Shaindel Beers "How does one survive the loss of a sister, the loss of everyone in the family besides the animals? Megan Alpert's gorgeous new collection, THE ANIMAL AT YOUR SIDE, is at once surreal and filled with the flora and fauna of a strangling world, where the speaker takes us with her along a path lined with feathers and bones. With an unnamed war in the background, ancestors waiting in the trees, everyone gone, everyone dead, we must find comfort in what still moves, even when it could be dangerous. In this troubled landscape, this ghosted familial place, the predators, the wolf, the coyote all roam free, and you, along with the speaker, become 'the animal at your side.' The poems in this collection are spare, stripped down to their eeriest knife-edge. These poems 'unhome' and unhinge, and I am enchanted with this haunting."--Jennifer Givhan

Offers young readers a delightful way to appreciate the attributes and behaviors of various animals.

The Animal Side is a manifesto on the importance of animals for human thought. It attempts to characterize the importance, for human beings, of the fact that animals exist. Adopting a philosophical and poetic approach, the book seeks to show that animals' ways of inhabiting the earth are, for human consciousness, an expansion and an exploration of what philosophers and poets have tried to name by speaking of the Open. Beginning with the story of an encounter with a deer on a road at night, the book proceeds by showing that, beyond the diversity of animal life and the ways animals differ from human beings, there is a "layer of the perceptible" on which we all draw, humans and animals alike, in our own ways. At present, however, this layer itself is at risk. Thus the book can also be read as a defense and illustration of animals' modes of being, and as a plea for their survival.

Much has been written about animals in applied ethics, environmental ethics, and animal rights. This book takes a new turn, offering an examination of the 'animal question' from a more fundamental, philosophical-anthropological perspective. The contributors in this important volume focus on how the animal has appeared and can be used in philosophical argumentation as a metaphor or reference point that helps us understand what is distinctively human and what is not. A recurring theme in the essays is the existence of a zone of ambiguity between animals and humans, which puts into question comfortable assumptions about the uniqueness and superiority of human nature. While the chapters straddle the boundaries of historical-philosophical and systematic, continental and analytic approaches, their thematic unity knits them together, presenting a rich, broad, and yet cohesive perspective. The first part of the book offers general explorations of the relation between animal and human nature, and of the concomitant existential and ethical dimensions of this relationship. The chapters in the second part address the same theme, but, in so doing, focus on specific aspects of animal and human nature: imagination, politics, history, sense, finitude, and science