ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anne Haven McDonnell lives in Santa Fe, NM where she teaches as associate professor in English and Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She migrates to the coastal northwest most summers. Her poetry has been published in Orion Magazine, The Georgia Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Alpinist Magazine, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Her poems won the fifth annual Terrain.org poetry prize and second place for the Gingko international ecopoetry prize. Anne has been a writer-in-residence at the Andrews Forest Writers’ Residency and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology.

PRAISE FOR LIVING WITH WOLVES

Living with Wolves is exactly what it says it is, as much as language can make it so. In the way it shares so many diverse voices, this collection, which is also part travelogue and part fable, is a Spoon River Anthology of a bioregion. As the voices wash over us, we become part of an ecology of fear and love. We feel our own “skin lit and honed” by “the bodied toothy fact” of wolves and their “howls that spin into whirl.” At times, this ecology is beautiful, companionable, and sweet, while it can also be bloody and awful, but it is, we feel, the truth of our mutual story which just might make “another animal” of us if we let it. Anne Haven McDonnell has written a remarkable, earthy, and wise collection that surprises and delights as it helps us understand what it might be to wholly belong to a place. I think everyone who is making policy decisions about wolves and other apex predators should read this book.

— DEREK SHEFFIELD, Poetry Editor for Terrain.org and author of Not for Luck, Winner of the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize

“Something old was born” states the first poem in this clear-eyed, remarkable collection by Anne Haven McDonnell. And yes, it’s true. An old telling filled with new awareness. A sense of animals as presence, as social beings, as neighbors once again. Rewilding thrums through these pages, which are acutely aware of the social complications they navigate, yet are still thrilled with “that surge of fear / you wouldn’t trade for anything.”  

McDonnell’s generous poetic vision allows people to tell their own stories—the sculptor, the trapper, the biologist, the farmer—and she does the important work of contextualizing herself, too.  This is documentary poetics with deep heart. The speaker is “The Visitor,” bringing her own dreams, leaving after a time, thus both better and less able to see the nuances of the full story of the wolves’ return to an island.

A refreshingly direct gaze appears here, taking in the world, reflecting it back to us.  What’s wondrous strange is that by the book’s end the island the wolves the people seem to move from that clarity into myth. Not because of any tricky use of image or story, but because they are so finely wrought.  How could they not hold great meaning, vast import?  This is the deep magic of Brigit Pegeen Kelly.  This is the accurate eye of John McPhee.  This is an important new voice in poetry.  Bold and careful, wild and human.

— ELIZABETH BRADFIELD, author of Toward Antarctica, Once Removed, Approaching Ice, and Interpretive Work