Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 88
- Language: English
- Date Published: August 2025
- ISBN 978-1-962847-35-3
Praise
As Janet MacFadyen writes in her lovely and beguiling new collection, Love Letters to the Wild: “It’s hard not to leave the body, not to evaporate into the air,” especially in this time of threat. Yet each of these lyrical pieces invites us back into embodied experience of the physical world, until we realize that we are every element that surrounds us—“the parched forest . . . cricket wings . . . a dried up stream.” Reading these delicately woven pieces, we come to see that “We have no bodies other than light / No heart other than sunlight rippling across our trunks.” Spend some time with this gorgeous volume, and you will soon throw open the door, aching for more contact with the wild Earth again. —James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart and Turning Toward Grief
Janet MacFadyen’s newest collection seeks and invites us to be “pried open,” to “see how leaves underfoot lay down their bodies as a sentence.” The letters of this collection—to storm clouds, woods, gray light, wasps, an old house—seek to still time, to interrupt the ongoing news all around us for a moment of reckoning with fish, swans, squirrels, wind, and chickadees. A reckoning with all that is “already here,” and with which, if we want to live fully, we must fully acknowledge. I’m grateful for this meditation, this call to attention. —Elizabeth Bradfield, author of SOFAR: Poems and co-creator of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry
A voice vigorous and sweet infuses Love Letters to the Wild. Janet MacFadyen’s instinct, affection, and knowledge of nature power forth direct address to our fellow constituents—from chickadees to woods to the sea’s “watery sunlit porches.” Have you considered the connection of stone “to the dreaming web”? This book exquisitely celebrates green, and includes dearest partnership, revered artwork, the heft of home, the luminosity of fashioned habitat. Read for its uplift, its movement from dryness to verdure, from windy to moist, its shadows, its joy in the holy earth. —Mary Gilliland, author of Ember Days and The Devil’s Fools
Excerpt
Dear Storm Clouds,
Please accept these poems: sand and bone, ochre and ash. We have been running up and down on paved switchbacks, our only path through sharks fins of stone, hued peach and olive-green — a giant gravel pit. My hat goes flying, rain drops flying. Pelting wind and sunlight, eardrums popping, all of us blinded, bombarded with images with no context. No sorting mechanism to separate the borax from salt, salt from bone.
Is this ecstasy or devastation? We stare and stare, but all we see are the nos: no potable water, no flushable water, no water in the sinks except badwater. No easy exit. No understanding of water spitting down from the sky like manna.
Didn’t you say all this was ours?
Author
Janet MacFadyen is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently State of Grass (Salmon Poetry 2024) and Waiting to Be Born (Dos Madres Press 2017), along with four chapbooks. Honors include a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, a 7-month Fine Arts Work Center fellowship in Provincetown, and a Cill Rialaig residency in Ireland, in addition to prizes for the Naugatuck River Review and Common Ground Review annual contests. She has been nominated for the Best of the Net, Pushcart, and Forward prizes. Recent work appears in Slant, The Closed Eye Open, The Hopper, The High Window, Scientific American, Wordpeace, and several Writing the Land anthologies. She is the managing editor of Slate Roof Press, a poetry chapbook collaborative. In earlier lives, she majored in geology and worked for a meteorological instrument manufacturer.
