Book Review: Sensitive Creatures

Zdeněk Macháček

Sensitive Creatures by Kirsten Reneau; Belle Point Press, 2024

Reviewed by L Mari Harris

trampset published Kirsten Reneau’s opening essay “What I Remember” because we recognized a voice that needed to be heard. Now, she has presented us with the gift of a full-length essay collection, entitled Sensitive Creatures, published by Belle Point Press.

Sensitive Creatures contains twenty-one essays, each effortlessly weaving together the human world and the natural world.

The collection is separated into two parts: The Wreckage We Do, and The Regeneration. We attempt to destroy each other, ourselves, and the world we only temporarily live in, and Reneau wants you to know that, while painful and often crushing, this destruction is many times a liminal space to move through, that there is regeneration and metamorphosis waiting to awaken.

In her prologue, Reneau writes, “Emotional hurt is different. . . . humans’ DNA can carry memories of traumatic stress, changing a person on a molecular level.” And while there is healing and rebuilding, we have been changed forever.

Reneau opens herself wide and invites us to look inside, to recognize the familiar, as healing and scarring are not just human conditions, but animal and environmental conditions. And while we love to think we are above the animal world, that we are more evolved, Reneau reminds us that we share commonalities — a newt regrowing parts of its body when damaged. Dolphins clicking to communicate love and sadness and distress. Hummingbirds migrating north to south, south to north, twice a year, flying solo, returning to their favorite spot each time, longing to be “home.”

And Reneau has been willing to do the hard work of putting herself back together again, to make herself stronger along the fault lines. Depression, anxiety, disordered eating, and suicidal ideation are handled deftly, respectfully, and honestly, not only for herself, but for the reader.

In “How the Cicada Screams,” Reneau addresses the destructive aftermath of her sexual assault: “When I left school again, I began wearing oversized sweatshirts, creating an exoskeleton of my own, and started dreaming of being buried alive, forced to swallow dirt.” But this isn’t a desire for death. It’s a desire to slumber, to metamorphosis, through the healing process of time.

Every essay in some way brings Reneau back to nature, to the natural world. Precarious. Evolving. Surviving. Building temporary houses. Building a new temporary house. And again. Floating. Burrowing.

More than anything, Reneau’s collection is about how we look for our identity in others’ eyes, hands, bodies. How we hate ourselves for being so needy, and how we hate ourselves more that we can’t stop doing the things we know are killing our souls. But don’t think this collection is without hope. Reneau shows us we can live through the destructive times and rebuild. And through those scars, we are stronger, more resilient.

Humans have an inherent need to survive, as that little light of life is always shining. Sometimes, it’s behind a closed door. Sometimes, it’s in the distance, faintly seen but unreachable in the moment. But hold tight and push forward. You’re moving closer to that little light of life, one step at a time, one day at a time.

Kirsten Reneau has given us a gift with Sensitive Creatures. It may be pre-ordered here through Belle Point Press.