In Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese,” she writes, “You do not have to be good . . . You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.” This is a sort of quiet rebellion, in that the speaker is careful and intentional about the space they’re taking as the world quite literally zooms out: “. . . the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,” leaving them like a pinprick back on the ground. Maria Giesbrecht’s poetry debut from Write Bloody Publishing, A Little Feral, is the opposite of quiet. The speaker has been silent for too long—she shouts, “I am here!”—so she gives herself to the reader, unapologetically, unfiltered, and a little messy.
A Little Feral is raw and vulnerable in drawing upon Giesbrecht’s upbringing in a Mennonite community. In a recent People profile, Giesbrecht recounts leaving home at a young age and how she “began figuring out how to survive on my own. The first night on a bare mattress in my new room, I stayed up until 3 a.m. writing a poem about flirting with God.” This quote is the crux of the collection, as the speaker turns from the confines of organized religion and its rituals to find a god within herself. In one of the most striking poems in the collection, “I think I pulled a little god from my mouth,” the speaker says:
“. . . her jaw simply hanged
open like a red tulip
on autopilot in April.
Rumor has it
this woman birthed
a voice the size of her life.”
The structure of the collection is arranged by a prefacing poem and five sections, each framed by an epigraph from fierce female figures like Virginia Woolf and Brandie Carlile. These epigraphs are crucial, in that they’re in conversation with the speaker, while simultaneously ushering her growing voice throughout the book. Giesbrecht indulges the reader by gifting the delightful title poem at the beginning, instead of withholding it, where the speaker “[saws] off / two slices of watermelon and let[s] them drip disgusting / down my elbows . . .” Right away, we’re shown the messy and slightly feral framing of the speaker we’ll get to know, and want to know, throughout each poem. This prefacing poem welcomes and primes the reader, while Giesbrecht examines complex themes revolving around agency, faith, gender, intergenerational trauma, and desire.
Many of the poems are arranged as a single, left-aligned stanza, where Giesbrecht makes associative and bold leaps, often surreal in their nature (“my body morphed / into a lighthouse”), contained in a form that’s easily approachable and consumable for readers. Still, there are stark moments where the syntax is broken out of its comfort zone, like in “Farming,” where the safety net of left-aligned lines is abandoned through hybridity—scattering, gaps of white space, and fragmentation. Here, the speaker experiments with the depths of their agency, testing and pushing the limits of language. The epistolary poems “Dear sister, I’m sorry” and “Dear Corey” are tender in the way the speaker seeks out the language to hold those that mean the most to her. The direct addresses in these letters are intimate, as if the speaker is also making room to hold the reader.
This tenderness is contrasted by the speaker’s complicated relationship with her father. This complexity is portrayed in a five-part sequential poem, “Father leads marriage counseling in our living room,” in which the speaker says, “I still remember how Father opened / his chest, letting a thousand hornets loose / on Mother.” This poem is visceral in characterizing a layered and contradictory parent, as he tends to the romantic relationships of other couples in the community. While it would perhaps be easy to villainize the father, Giesbrecht instead positions the poems revolving around intergenerational trauma as a means of resistance. She examines the physical and emotional scars left behind from her father and faith in “White birds”:
“At three, I stepped on Dad’s liquor
bottle and now there’s a robin’s
nest, faint and white, on the inside
of my left foot. It never went away.”
Yet, throughout the poem, she shifts the narrative by stating “My collection, my prized white birds – / if sold at auction, might save the world.” The sentiment of honoring one’s scars is even represented on the vibrant cover of A Little Feral, where a living room is stuffed with a flurry of doves, feathers floating in the air and scattered across the rug. These birds are both an extended metaphor and a vehicle for moving through each poem. As a final motif, the single-stanza poems that often show up could be construed as little birds themselves, acting like concrete containers, paralleling the subject material. This collection teaches us to own our pain and channel it into something beautiful; it tells us we have control of our stories, no matter where we came from or how we got here.
By rooting for the speaker in A Little Feral, we’re rooting for Giesbrecht’s brave and delightful debut in all its honesty and wit. She doesn’t hold back or frame herself as the hero of her story, but she’s surely its main character. Even though the sentiment might be softer in Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” what it’s asking isn’t dissimilar. Giesbrecht breathes life into a speaker who’s believable and raw in her making, in her desire to nurture her voice from the soil of grief. She doesn’t hold back and encourages the reader to do the same. She isn’t asking us to be ferocious, to crash through the world without any regard for others; instead, she’s teaching us to hold ourselves a little ferally, unequivocally—even the parts we shy from.
