The Animated Forest (Peepal Tree Press) is the long-awaited debut poetry collection by Trinidad-born, US-based Samantha Thornhill, already the author of a series of children’s books. The poems speak to Thornhill’s “core belief in the power of empathy and compassion as aesthetic markers.” The book reveals “the splendid tensions and graces of an immigrant’s imagination and language, rooted as she is in her Trinidad birthplace, and her uneasy American home.”