Full Description
In richly detailed poems of wolf girls and feral boys, green children, and polar explorers, mermaids, orphans, and moth collectors, Janet McAdams explores the vexed relationship between human and non-human nature, between body and land. How to understand the voice lost between forest and city, which cries, "I am not wild, I am not human." Why fear wildness? What lies in the need to tame ourselves and others? These are the questions raised in Feral, the eagerly anticipated second collection by the American Book Award winning author of The Island of Lost Luggage.
At times tender, at times angry, the chorus of displaced voices in Feral maps our fractured relationship with the earth and issues a call for reunion. "What if the world came back?" one voice asks. What if "lake river ocean" called our bodies to remember? In the visionary anti-epic that concludes the book, a people struggle to understand their history as they journey toward their land of origin, toward the earth they are trying to remember. Through finely wrought imagery, a keen musicality, and a perspective that is both compassionate and exacting, this powerful collection explores how our relationship to land determines who we are -as individuals, as cultural beings, and as nations.
Contents
The Collectors
Offices of Pity
Twin, Disappearing
The Fish Girl
What She Will Sing to You
The Prisoner of Castle Pilsach
The Polar Journeys
The Sister of the Swans
The Animal Baths
Letter from the Crimea
The Green Children
The Orphan Train
Buffalo in Six Directions
Interview with the Reader
The Daughter of No One
Dreaming, the Book of
Ghazal of Body
One Day the Girl
The Way the World Comes Back
Girl in Phone Booth
Moths
The Manson Girls
The Children of Animals
Wing
A Natural History of Hands
Sanctuary
Ghost Ranch
Earth My Body Is Trying to Remember
Notes
