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The table of contents plays a trick worth the price of the book: "Now" appears twice. So does "Drool Kings." The I Ching is consulted twice—once for sunset, once for self-creation—and the second throw never returns the first. A collection that repeats its titles is making a claim about time, and the acknowledgments must cite one Now by page number—a title no longer being an address. The cover names the theory: full-time. The mammal's schedule lists a single hour. It is called Now. It posts twice because it never repeats.

Rennie Ament's second collection—winner of the 2025 Iowa Poetry Prize, chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy, following Mechanical Bull from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center—runs forty-five poems on the clock of that title. The debut rode the fake animal; this book clocks in as the real one. Read as a document, the contents resolve into an employee handbook crossed with a field guide: "My Role," "Unconscious Self-Regulation," "Innate Priors," "Impossible Task" filed beside "Foraging," "Farming," "Floe," "Porcupine." The diction of human resources and the cognitive-science lab, applied to the one position nobody applied for. Being a mammal is employment without part-time, without leave, without a resignation the employer will accept. The book knows the register is ugly—"Unconscious self-regulation isn't a beautiful phrase," one poem concedes—and uses it anyway. "Faster, Blood!" runs the shift's verb through its idioms—work for peanuts, get worked up, work on the self—"It won't be worked out. Or it will. In the end." Ament takes the vocabulary at its word and lets the animals answer.

"Porcupine" is the method poem. "I'm vulnerable with animals," it opens. "They are an interpersonal event." The transaction is exact—a pocked crabapple offered, attention returned—then the poem rounds on its own instrument. Better to wipe off "the smear of language on the already." The world precedes the saying, and "What exists does not need a cowboy hat." What the porcupine takes off her hands is "Blah blah blah blah blah"—the one colleague who accepts our speech as compost, relieving us of the task never in the job description. The apostrophe—"O my little fleshy mace"—is tenderness addressed to a weapon, which is roughly the book's theory of the body. Then the animal adjourns the meeting: the porcupine turns its back, time to chuck "archaic modes of processing."

The suspicion of the instrument runs through the titles: "The Problem with Language Is Using It." Speech is the overtime the species assigned itself, and the book reaches for tools that work without asserting—"The Poem as Tactical Breaching Kit," door-forcing equipment for a structure locked from inside. It fires the book's best shot at the org chart: "Darwin was wrong to place men at the top of his mid-level marketing scheme." A love poem gives the position its start date—"It's reverse meiosis. First, in order to live, I had to divide and divide"—then names the one exit the employer honors: two people merging into "this solid block of brain between us." Employment begins at the cell. The only way off the clock is to stop being one employee.

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The animals are coworkers, not metaphors, and the repeated titles not reprints. The two poems called "Drool Kings" share only their fluid. In the first, empathy is measured in saliva: the heaviest droolers watching a man eat lemons post the highest empathy scores—"a mouth proficient in slobbering." The second rides every animal in reach and ends consumed, by fruit, then by a drooling human mouth. Ament lives in Owls Head, Maine; one poem is "Owls Head 6.19.24"—home filed under its date. "Like Mary Shelley on Lake Geneva" remembers Tambora's year—July snow in Maine, the villa above starving towns—then eyes today's private-jet compatriots: the bolt-hole as attempted resignation from the shift. The poems hold the left margin almost without exception; "Crisis of Presence" breaks formation, staggering thought-blocks across the page, the interior chorus "part of a brain-run economy." Even thought is staffed.

The wager of the whole is that attention is the wage. The second "Now" cannot be the first, and one of them says so: "The thing about now is the past has untreated syphilis." There is no quitting; the position was assigned at the first division, and the compensation is the entire visible world, paid hourly, forfeited if unnoticed. The title is not a complaint. It is the job, accepted. And the final poem—whose speaker says her name means "Reborn Without Mind"—ends the book on two words: "industrial lasting."

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