“Sad Boy appeared each night like the moon, rising large and white over our roof.” Beside him sat Lola, his wife, who acted as his protector and companion. Sad Boy and Lola were two of the 30 cats Courtney Gustafson was surprised to find in her yard when she moved into a rental house in the Poets Square neighborhood of Tuscon, Arizona.
Gustafson’s puzzlement quickly turned to a desire to help. The cats were starving, many of them sick. She and her boyfriend were strapped for cash; her job at a nonprofit food pantry couldn’t cover her medical debt, let alone cat food.
Gustafson recounts her adventures with these cats and many others in her poignant, beautifully written debut memoir, Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats, a book that will change the way readers think about feline and human nature alike. As the author describes her growing relationships with the cats and her journey to becoming a caretaker, trap-neuter-return practitioner, community organizer and social media content creator (with 1 million followers on TikTok), she weaves in anecdotes from her past experiences with relationships, identity, trauma and family.
Gustafson deftly relates the story of Sad Boy and Lola alongside that of her first romantic relationship with an emotionally abusive older man. MK, who mistook another adult cat, Georgie, for her kitten, going so far as to nurse her, presents an opportunity for Gustafson to process her mother’s cancer treatment. In some cases, the cat stories overtake the more memoiristic parts of the book, and readers might be tempted to rush through them to learn more about Bubbles, François and Dr. Big Butt. But when Gustafson hits the balance, her essays sing.
What makes Poets Square stand out among other animal welfare stories is Gustafson’s insistence that the suffering of domestic animals often mirrors the suffering of the people who care for them, especially those who are stymied by poverty, mental and chronic illness, homelessness and a host of other societal problems over which they lack control. “Feral,” she writes, “just means that an animal was abandoned by the system that created it,” the same systems, we can surmise, that abandon people.
A necessary read for those who work and volunteer in animal welfare, Poets Square is also a loving tribute to the way animals can provide “bright thriving spots of hope in the world.”
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