Poets Square A Memoir in Thirty Cats

Funny enough, I didn’t follow @poetssquarecats before reading the book, which sounds, when you know me, nearly unimaginable, as most of my following list on my main consists of accounts about cats. We received the German version a few weeks ago and I made the best of my days off to dive into it. And what a lovely read!! I can’t even begin to describe how moving it is for me to read about someone taking care of strays. The devotion, the love, the time, the selflessness and the mental load it takes to carry this weight of suffering is unfathomable. Courtney describes it beautifully through her essays and it’s fair of her to answer « me neither » when she’s told « i don’t know how you do it », because one has to face so much to discover one’s ability to love and care that makes the pain worth waking up every morning. Thankfully, the book isn’t only about witnessing how raw nature can be. Through her neighbourhood’s cats, Courtney retraces her own story and analyses the challenges she had to face as a young adult with anxiety, struggling to fit in and fulfilling others’ expectations of her. The parallel made between the cats' behaviours and our own as humans is eye-opening honestly and the themes covered had a deep emotional resonance in me; grief and loss, connexion, relationship, resilience, acceptance, self-growth... More than anything, it's the story of a community and people coming together despite their financial and emotional struggles to serve a shared purpose: helping cats, helping themselves. It's a clever way for an author to depict what is at stake in the environment they live in. It's a subtle cultur criticism, very empathetic and never judgmental. My favourite parts were the essays about the Hotdog Man and Desert Palms exactly for this reason. I was very moved to discover the faces of the cats my heart bled for once I followed the instagram account. It made everything make sense, connected all the dots. This book gave me hope and healed a part of my inner child. Thank you.