FEAST OR FAMINE

Caught in a Cat Romance  by Airie McCready (2025) is a picture-poetry anthology of cats, specifically the Sphynx and Devon Rex cats – the hairless cats. The photos are stunning and a beautiful accompaniment to the poems.    The 24 cat poems are a delight to read. Examples include “If their souls had a song” –  “Sealed in a Purr” – “A Clock & A Cat – and ”One True North.” Evident in the poems is the ability of the cats to heal a person.  Reading the poem “Cat Medicine” sums up the physical and mental healing of being with a cat: “When I touch your back, my pains slips away. Maybe for a minute, an hour, a day.”   These poems are both personal, reflecting inward, and external, in praise of all the poet’s cats, naked and furred. It’s a wonderful escape to read this anthology. 

  Paws for a Moment  by Zohar Kohavi (2025) is a memoir-type book about the author’s life with his cat, Cato, for 21 years across three continents. The author reflects on daily life, illness, aging, and grief. This pet story is a meditation on love, loss, companionship, and the blurred boundaries between human and animal interactions.    The book is structured as a series of titled prose-poems or micro-essays. Each section can be read on its own but are also interconnected with other sections, copying the way grief and memory circles, doubles back, and resists closure in one’s mind.   I like the way the author doesn’t romanticize the challenges of caring for an aging animal. Instead, he captures the frustration and tenderness. As the author states, “Writing brings him back to life. Revives our relationship. Strums the delicate strings of understanding between us.”    Although this book is intensely personal, it has universal appeal and resonance. The n...

Nestled between the Black and Caspian Seas, where Europe and Asia meet, the Caucasus Mountains gives rise to some of the world’s most incredible biodiversity. During my visit to the Museum of History in Tbilisi, I was struck by the wild, breathing world of the animal kingdom. In the Museum of History in Tbilisi, Georgia, the wildlife of the region is shown in life-like forms.    In a small wing of the museum, an exhibition on the biodiversity of the Caucasus region reveals wolves and lynx, eagles and ibex, insects, and wildflowers, all rendered in glass cases or detailed dioramas – ecologically rich and rare.   The Caucasus is considered one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, home to over 6,500 plant species; hundreds of mammals, birds, and reptiles; and a high rate of endemism (species that exist nowhere else).   This is due to the region’s dramatic topography and varied climate: alpine meadows, lowland forests, wetlands, and semi-desert plains all exist within a...

  Opposite the entrance gate of the Paris Garden of Plants ( Jardin des Plantes ) is the snake fountain. Actually, it is called the Cuvier Fountain in memory of Georges Cuvier, a French naturalist and zoologist.     On the corner of Rue Cuvier in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the site was formally the prison of the Abbey of Saint-Victor which had a fountain called the Alexander Fountain or the Brush Fountain. The prison, including the fountain, was demolished in 1840.   French architect Alphonse Vigoureux (1802-1853) was the water inspector for the city of Paris. He created the snake fountain from 1840-1846 to pay respect to Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) to replace the Alexander Fountain. Jean Leopold Nicolas Frederic – Baron Cuvier – is best known as the “father of paleontology” and establishing that species extinction was a fact in his work  Essay on the Theory of the Earth  (1813). The French government listed it as a historical monument in 1984.   ...