Oklahoma Bestiary, Quarterly west, 2025

Oklahoma Bestiary was the runner-up for the 2023 Quarterly West Chapbook Award. It's a collection of five stories about Oklahoma wild animals and its even wilder people. Author Jess Arndt selected Oklahoma Bestiary and this is what they said: 

“In these five crackling stories, bodies--both real and grief-imagined--come apart under the pulverizing pressures of small-town Oklahoman life. While violence-smeared and peopled by characters who are at best, inchoate, and at worst, architects of their own destruction, Oklahoma Bestiary’s inner panes feel lit with sensitivity, opening towards material feelings that are both tenderizing and tender. A roadrunner, despite its apparent stamina, can only run for so long. Says the story’s weary troubadour: “I often think about myself at the end of high school, about that roadrunner, a second before exploding, his head low, no direction, just a bunch of young, strong muscles that made him keep going… .” Part of the power in Rachele Salvini’s rendering is how mutually she treats the bodies on her pages. Cockroaches, opossums, a chimerical and ill-fated gator, flies—all feel distinctly alive, as in: failing, wounded, and ultimately desirous of something as yet ungraspable, but more, like us.” 

What is being said about Oklahoma Bestiary: 

“These energetic, constantly shifting stories do more than surprise.  They break your understanding and rebuild it into something new and fresh and dazzling. OKLAHOMA BESTIARY is an amazing and enthralling read.” 

                       -- Fred Leebron, author of Six Figures

"The stories in Rachele Salvini's Oklahoma Bestiary offer a bewitching vision of Oklahoma and its strangeness, full of urgency, compassion, and written with a clarifying richness to detail. Rachele Salvini is a writer to keep an eye on. She's fantastic!"

-- Brandon Hobson, author of The Removed