Janet McAdams

Search for a word or phrase in this book …

Biographical note:  Janet McAdams, a writer of Scottish, Irish, and Creek ancestry, grew up in Alabama. She's worked as a telephone operator, a cartographer, a camp counselor, a maid, a cook, and an exercise instructor for people with developmental disabilities. She received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Emory University, where her studies focused on American Indian poetry. She has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Alabama, the American School of El Salvador, the University of Oklahoma, and is presently the Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Poetry at Kenyon College.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712953
ISBN-10:  1844712958
ISBN-13:  9781844712953
Author:  Janet McAdams
Title:  Feral
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  28-Feb-07
Extent:  92pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  138 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  

Table of 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

Excerpt from book:  

Wing

Hawk, I would like to unimagine your death,
whether you wrenched yourself
free of the barbed wire

and lingered, gimp-bird, stunned
to find you could not fly or navigate.
Phantom wing pushing the air
like a pillow clouding you into sleep
forever.

Or if coyotes took you down.
Or men with metal objects.

I have nine feathers from your wing-
the side turned toward the sun

is glossy black, the underside-
cream cut across with stripes of brown.
Fanned out across the desk where I try
to write you down.

Beside an apple withering
like a heart awaiting a new
host body.
Oh, how beautiful

the red hair of the woman who came
to clip feather from bone, to wash
each one like a breakfast dish rimmed with egg
or a scum of milk. To dry the wispy barbs tender as a

a child’s brown curls. Who scraped

the tip of red flesh, the lost flesh
of your lost wing. The bone like a chicken wing
sucked dry at a picnic. Oh, had I

found you sooner, you would have clawed me raw,
my human hands, my human
face. You would never have endured saving.