"Taxidermy is a great bad object: ludicrous, cruel, splashy, quirky, sometimes unselfconscious, and often extremely beautiful."

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=955&fulltext=1&media=

Anjuli Raza Kolb on The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing

Forgive Us Our Skins: On Poliquin's 'Breathless Zoo'

September 27th, 2012

"Notwithstanding these oblique critiques of the economies and social orders that uphold taxidermy and the broader realm of Euro-American naturalism of which it is a piece, Poliquin stops short of a sustained materialist analysis of her objects as commodities. Instead, she concentrates on the narrative and poetic capacities of taxidermy, calling animal displays “eloquent,” “metonymic of entire geographies, concentrating in animal form what made those distant landscapes so ferociously exciting, so exotic,” and so they are. Because they were made precisely to last, however, skins — emotionally persuasive and insistently literal — remain a stubborn material residue of the cultural and economic histories of the well-appointed interiors of bourgeois adventure consumers as well as the great European and American houses of learning.
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Taxidermy is a great bad object: ludicrous, cruel, splashy, quirky, sometimes unselfconscious, and often extremely beautiful. Poliquin calls taxidermy “troubling” and “ambiguous,” in nearly every chapter, reinforcing her argument for the poetics of strangeness. A story from Kafka illustrates the poignancy of such a poetics. “A Crossbreed [A Sport]” describes a hybrid creature, “half kitten, half lamb,” which the narrator says is “a legacy from my father.” The life of the creature is sad and amusing: a terrified stalker, a sinister skipper, it prefers to feed on milk, and, “though it has countless step-relations in the world, has perhaps not a single blood relation.”"