In his second full-length poetry collection Cow Stomach and Mother Fat, Steve Halle interrogates how our innermost selves emerge from time immemorial to navigate conditional economies of being. Written and refined over a fourteen-year span, Cow Stomach and Mother Fat employs the dramatis personae of Cow Stomach, Mother Fat, and Ensu Fario, whose monologues and verses use dark comedy to explore ideas of hunger, needfulness, want, desire, and love; emergence and formation of being and identity; how human and nonhuman persons are intertwined and enmeshed in precarious systems; toxicity/toxic masculinity; monstrousness; formlessness; and the politicization and regulation of gender, among other subjects. Halle's poetry blends aggressive incantatory prose poem streams with softer lyrical flights and stylized design elements to create a sui generis work that reckons with the seemingly sacred forces that may be misused to commodify our most intimate interrelationships.