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.