OBIR: Occasional Biased and Ignorant Reviews reflecting this reader’s opinion.
CLUBHOUSE GUEST REVIEWER – Melanie Marttila
CATS AND DOGS IN SPACE: Speculative Poetry About our Feline Friends and Canine Companions – by Lisa Timpf
Publisher: Hiraeth Publishing, February 2025.
When Lisa Timpf requested reviewers for her new speculative poetry collection Cats and Dogs in Space, I immediately put my name in. Not only does the collection hit an intersectional sweet spot for me—cats and dogs, poetry, and spec fic? Sign me up!—but I’d also read and adored several of her speculative short stories about AI-enhanced Galactic Space Services operatives Quicksilver and Pepper. If you haven’t come across them yet, you really need to check them out. Think Mary Robinette Kowal’s Sunday Morning Transport story, “Rude Litterbox Space” meets Murderbot.
But I digress. In Cats and Dogs in Space, I was anticipating reading some entertaining and provocative speculative poetry. I wasn’t disappointed.
I loved this collection, but I must confess to having a serious soft spot for cats and dogs, having shared my life with, at different times, 2 cats (including Thufir Howat the mentat cat) and 4 dogs. So far.
The collection is divided into four sections. In the first, From the Headlines: Poems Sparked by News Stories, Timpf draws on journalism—there’s a section of the end linking the articles in question which are interesting reading indeed—that sparked poems that make the reader think in turn.
With the poems in this section, the poet poses questions, not all of which she answers. In “Cryptic,” she asks what if cats are behind a test that determines how well humans can read their expressions? “The Truth is Out” wonders what if cats are, if fact, aliens? “Military Ghost Dog” poses the question, what are the relative benefits of a robot dog? “For Laika” wonders what Laika’s last thoughts were as she died alone in space. “The Cats Have Their Say” gives voice to cats’ displeasure with humanity’s obsession with dogs. And finally, “Canem Roboto” asks what the lives of robot dogs on Mars look like?
If you follow Timpf’s poems to their final implications, our treatment of our animal companions, biological and otherwise, says more about us than it does about them.
In Legendary, Timpf riffs on myth, legend, and folklore. The Cat and the Fiddle, Mother Hubbard’s dog, Cerberus, First Dog, and the last dog all make appearances here, but not always in expected ways. Take “What Really Happened,” for example. Written after Eugene Field’s “The Duel,” Timpf’s poem states, “only the Border Collie knows” how the fight (potentially domestic violence, or a couple of toys, depending how you read the subtext) between the gingham dog and the calico cat really ended. Field’s poet only repeats what the Chinese plate and the old Dutch clock tell him, but for the price of a pig’s ear and a marrow bone, Timp’s Border Collie is willing to tell all.
The Great Hereafter is a profound meditation on loss and grief. In “The Cat’s Message,” a cat lives and is willing to die on its own terms, asking its human not to lament. “To Let You Go Gently” is a promise from human to aging dog not to let selfishness obscure the truth, “when it’s time.” The next two poems are haibun, which is a narrative followed by a haiku. And those haiku hit like a gut-punch, let me tell you. In “Paws for Reflection,” the poet wishes she could once more watch her former pups wreck her garden. An encounter with a “Ghostly Dog” is comforting rather than frightening. The tree under which past dogs have been buried becomes part dog.
In Cats and Dogs of the Future, a 2120 HR guide extols the virtues of gen-mod cat people over dog people, snake people, or horse people. The cats of the future “fearlessly tread / in the pawprints of Félicette, / first feline in space, / though hoping for a gentler fate”. In the 2080s, robot dogs fetch data, consider gene-splicing options, hike through virtual worlds, and clone their humans. “Dogs in Space” lament “if only the aliens’ ship / hadn’t looked like a fetch toy.” And when humanity succumbs to the final, fatal pandemic, cats and dogs survive, cats only regretting the lack of their servitors, and the dogs happy to bark with no one to tell them “no.”
Yes, Timpf’s poetry invites the reader to speculate, but she also invokes discomfiting emotions. Several of her poems brought me back to the thoughts and feelings inspired when I read Andre Alexis’ Fifteen Dogs.
“Hanging Them Up” addresses a retired police service dog: “you might well gnaw at the problem / of why your human partner leaves / for shift without you, now; wonder / whether you, who have always tried / so hard to please, have unwittingly / committed some transgression.”
The final lines of “For Laika” wonder, “alone, at the end, did you regret / you never had the chance to tell them / you’d have happily settled / for a good long car ride / with your head thrust out an open window?”
In “Canem Roboto,” “The assigned tech flips the off switch, quelling forever the glow from those eerie eyes. With sure and steady hands, he dismantles each canid, one by one. Just doing his job. / Still, he is never the same, afterwards.”
And these are the “Musings of a Shelter Dog”: “Here at the shelter, I’m locked in a wire cave. / Humans have rarely ever shown me kindness. / It makes me wonder why you called First Dog / To join you by your fire, ancient man. / Far too late now, though, despite regret / Too late for us to join the wild pack.”
Reader, I wept.
CONCLUSION:
Highly recommended to lovers of poetry, cats, dogs, space, or any combination thereof.
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About the Author of “Cats and Dogs in Space”:
Lisa Timpf is a retired HR and communications professional who lives in Simcoe, Ontario. Throughout her life, Lisa has enjoyed the company of a variety of pets, including several dogs and one cat. Their antics have provided inspiration for both non-fiction and fiction works.
Lisa’s writing has appeared in a variety of venues, including New Myths, Polar Borealis, Star*Line, Triangulation: Seven Day Weekend, Eye to the Telescope, Thema, and Third Flatiron. Her speculative poetry collection Cats and Dogs in Space is available from Hiraeth Publishing.
You can find out more about Lisa’s writing projects at http://lisatimpf.blogspot.com. Lisa is also on Goodreads and Bluesky (lisatimpf.bsky.social).
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About the Guest Reviewer:
Melanie Marttila (she/her) is an author-in-progress, writing poetry and tales of hope in the face of adversity. She has been writing since the age of seven, when she made her first submission to CBC’s “Pencil Box” and is a graduate of the University of Windsor’s masters program in English Literature and Creative Writing.
Her poetry has appeared in Polar Borealis, Polar Starlight, Sulphur, and her debut poetry collection, The Art of Floating, was published in April 2024 by Latitude 46. Her short fiction has appeared in Pulp Literature, On Spec, Pirating Pups, and Home for the Howlidays.
She is a settler and writes in Sudbury, Ontario, or ‘N’Swakamok, on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory, home of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek and the Wahnapitae First Nation, in the house where three generations of her family have lived, on the street that bears her surname, with her spouse and their dog.
Substack: Alchemy Ink
blog: Always Looking Up
Facebook: https://facebook.com/melanie.marttila
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melaniemarttila/
Threads: https://www.threads.net/@melaniemarttila
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/melaniemarttila.bsky.social
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanie-marttila-20868047
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You can get Lisa Timpf’s speculative poetry collection here: < Cats and Dogs in Space >
