The Unnaming of Aliass is full of wonderfully goofy (and unrelenting) word-plays, and an endless, undying love for non-human others. Seamlessly stitching together a diverse and compelling array of animal studies and ecocritical scholarship, this book is a motherlode, yoking gothic southern literature, American imaginaries, human-animal relations, crazy-ass artworks and the importance of the pun, into an exquisitely rendered package that is sometimes impossibly, painfully beautiful. Nor is pain sugar-coated, as the author ponders the ethics of her relationship with “her beautiful ass,” who she consistently coopts into dangerous, uncomfortable situations in the name of art and poetry. The R.A.W. honesty of all of this is breathtaking, and the more profound for its acknowledgement of the difficulty of these relations, so often glossed over.

~ Tessa Laird, author of A Rainbow Reader and Bat

In an attempt to teach us what it might mean to “unname,” Bolender asks the reader to dwell in her love of language, to play with it, while at the same time paying attention to its limits and insufficiencies. Accordingly, throughout the text “unnaming” is presented as an act of resistance grounded in a deep respect for the power of wordplay as invitation to defamiliarize and notice-better. The Unnaming of Aliass is methodologically experimental, bringing feminist science studies, literary studies, visual arts, and experimental writing together, and weaving these into an original contribution to the emerging fields of artistic research and multispecies studies.

~ Natalie Loveless, author of How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation