At the center of Risa Bear’s “Ninety-One” is an act both small and quietly violent: a speaker catches crickets while they are singing, then throws them far out over water—not to watch where they land, but to listen for fish rising to take them. In five lines, the poem turns a bit of fishing or feeding into a meditation on exchange, attention, and the strange intimacy of participating in another creature’s death.
The title offers only a number, “Ninety-One.” It might be a count, an age, a year, or a private marker; the poem does not explain. That bareness isolates the scene from any larger biography. What remains is gesture and sound. The poem begins with the word “I,” but the speaker quickly vanishes into what is heard: “I caught crickets / at their singing —.” The dash after “singing” is the hinge of the poem. It cuts the cricket song short on the page, just as the speaker’s hand cuts it short in the grass. The phrase “at their singing” is especially precise: the speaker catches them not merely as objects but at the moment of their music, as though seizing song itself.
The poem has no rhyme, but its sound is carefully worked. The opening hard c of “caught” and “crickets” clicks like the insects themselves. The repeated n and ng sounds in “singing” and “flung” make the two verbs feel kin, so the singing seems to continue into the throwing, transformed. The line “then flung them / out far, to hear fish” breaks after “them,” and the sentence pitches forward across the line break, mimicking the arc of the flung crickets. The poem’s syntax also moves from past action—“caught,” “flung”—into the infinitive “to hear” and the participle “rising,” so the moment keeps opening outward after the throw. There is almost no visual detail: no color, no landscape, no description of the water or fish. The speaker’s purpose is auditory: “to hear fish / rising.” Not to see them, not to catch them, not to eat them. The speaker throws life into the water in order to listen.
The word “gift” at the end is the poem’s quiet shock. The crickets are not called bait; they are a gift. That word turns the act from simple predation into something more ambiguous, even tender. Yet a gift here is also something taken from the crickets. The speaker gives what was caught, and the crickets’ song is exchanged for another sound—the splash or swirl of a fish rising. The final words, “rising to my gift,” leave the fish in motion, not yet arrived. Because the poem ends on the noun “gift,” the reader is left holding that word, weighing whether it is generous or self-serving. The possessive “my” matters too: the offering is claimed, personal, part of the speaker’s own listening.
Part of what makes “Ninety-One” significant is its refusal to explain or moralize. It does not tell the reader what to feel about the crickets, the fish, or the speaker. Instead, it slows down a fleeting moment until its layers appear: the violence of catching, the beauty of listening, the strangeness of calling a death an offering. The speaker is both a participant in the food chain and an audience for its sounds. In eighteen words, the poem makes an ordinary act echo with a larger question—what it means to take another creature’s song and call the result a gift.