Rewilding

Name: Rewilding
SKU: 6540
Price: 16.00 USD
Availability: InStock

January Gill O'Neil

$16.00

Rewilding, a relatively new ecological term, means to return an area of land to its original state. Reveling in letting go of the damaged and broken parts of ourselves while celebrating renewal and new beginnings, O’Neil’s poetry examines the external worlds of race and culture and the internal, personal worlds of family and desire. Ultimately, these poems tap into what is wild and good in all of us.

Categories: All Books, AWP'23, Emerging Voices, January Gill O’Neil, Massachusetts Poetry Festival, NYC Poetry Fest, Poetry Tags: 2018, Emerging Voices, January Gill O’Neil, motherhood, mothers, Rewilding

Meet the Author

Photo of author — Photo Credit: John Andrews

January Gill O’Neil is the author of Misery Islands and Underlife, published by CavanKerry Press. She is the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, an assistant professor of English at Salem State University, and a board of trustees’ member with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and Montserrat College of Art. A Cave Canem fellow, January’s poems and articles have appeared in the Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among others. In 2018, January was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, and is the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence for 2019-2020 at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She lives with her two children in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Critic Reviews

“Why have I come here/at low tide, mudlarking/for bits of bottle and bone?” asks January O’Neil. Her fine, fine book, Rewilding is her brilliant, honest, and unflinching answer. Walk with her, reader, to the river bed, and catch your breath as she sifts gold from the debris.

—Cornelius Eady

January Gill O’Neil is a poet you can trust. With every book, every poem, every stanza, she writes with such grace, insight, and clarity, delineating the music, moments, and moods of her life as a mother, a divorcee, a single woman that one feels, while reading, uplifted, inspired, and even rewilded. She is a poet who touches the heart within the heart, the muse within the music, the magic within the ordinary. She is, in short, what most poets can only aspire to be—beautiful and true.

—Nin Andrews

In poems attuned to the ache and beauty of contemporary life, January Gill O’Neil cuts to the heart of love and loss, motherhood, and being black in a country where “we wear our history in our darkness, in our patience.” The title, Rewilding,is perfect for this book, driven by a speaker who, in wanting to live an authentic life, says, “Unrepentant, down on our knees, / we rise and rise and rise.”

—Marie-Elizabeth Mali