Books in the Poets Out Loud series

An electrifying feminist poetics combining language and visual collage to explore gender, landscape, taxidermy, and the idea of a ¿natural body¿An innovative book-length poem that delves into the intricacies of natural history dioramas, taxidermy, landscape, and women naturalists, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners is an experience of looking for ¿Woman¿s Work¿ in American natural history museums. Why, for instance, have the contributions of taxidermist and naturalist Martha Maxwell, the first person to create a ¿habitat group¿ display in the United States, and Delia Akeley, the wife of the ¿father of modern taxidermy,¿ been largely erased?Sarah Mangold mines language from natural history texts and taxidermy manuals from the 1800s to explore the perception and the reception of women in male-dominated scientific pursuits, as well as the doctrine of nature as pure, unpopulated, and outside historical and political time. A stunning work of visual and textual collage, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners creates a vibrant textual ecology that utilizes language as landscape while reshaping notions of nature and the natural.

Spoken on the margin between death and birth, reading and writing, separation and union, the poems of Errings address the absent-a lost leader, a remote love, a protege not yet born-and across those distances delineate the motion of consciousness as it passes from one body to the next.

NAMED THE BEST POETRY OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMESMy Daily Actions, or The Meteorites is the result of a daily investigative writing practice, in which I was worried that a poem invested in the particulars of my life would be uninteresting¿that the "ordinary" would be mundane. Instead memory, dreams, and the associative power of the imagination filled each moment with meaning, each tv show I watched or friend I spoke with, each outfit I wore or nail polish color I chose. In these poems, a combination of dread (for something approaching) and anxiety (for what might be approaching but isn't yet known) undid a sense of the present separate from climate change, global racial capitalism, whiteness, and gender-based violence, especially as I wrote as I tried to find out how my own gender fit into the world. The prose poem is the vehicle by which a recording practice ("journaling") meets the associative power of the poem.