Janet McAdams

Biographical note:  Janet McAdams grew up in Alabama and attended the University of Alabama, where she was graduated with a B.A. in English and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Her first book, The Island of Lost Luggage, won the Diane Decorah Award for Poetry from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas and was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2000. Praised by reviewers as “closely crafted” and “achingly beautiful,” the collection received the American Book Award in 2001. She has been a resident artist at the Hambidge Center, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center, and Ucross. A certified Integral Yoga teacher, she also teaches creative writing and indigenous literature at Kenyon College, where she is the Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Poetry. She is the editor of the Earthworks series of indigenous writing for Salt.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712953
ISBN:  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:  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.

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.

Unpublished endorsement :  Perhaps only a poet can or should express the feelings of ‘feral children’ and their caregivers, for no other human relationship so defies traditional ways of thinking. Janet McAdams shows us the minds of these folk with evocative language. Her poetic brush-strokes are broad, for nature and animal life are painted with equal originality, sensitivity, and empathy.

Douglas Candland, author of Feral Children and Clever Animals: Reflections on Human Nature

Unpublished endorsement :  Feral is an unusual and mysterious book. It moves through the imaginary territory shadowed by history and myth, but at the same time it gives off the aura of intimacy and the feeling of earnestness. The poems, intelligent and insightful, form a world full of wonder and pain and horror.

Ha Jin, National Book Award Winner

Unpublished endorsement :  This is the work of a writer who knows how to cross time in the present, to descend beneath the surface layers and see what lies beneath. The poems are riddles of human being and seem chained together, one to another, in ways that carry a reader back to the source, to origins, to a sensuous love of earth and to compassion.

Linda Hogan