I Thought There Would Be More Wolves: Poems

by Sara Ryan

Overview

After moving to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, poet Sara Ryan found herself immersed in the isolated spaces of the North: the cold places that never thawed, the bleak expanses of snow. These poems have teeth, bones, and blood—they clack and bruise and make loud sounds. They interrogate self-preservation, familial history, extinction, taxidermy, and animal and female bodies. In between these lines, in warm places where blood collects, animals stay hidden and hunted, a girl looks loneliness dead in the eye, and wolves come out of the woods to run across the frozen water of Lake Superior.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781602234499
Publisher:	University of Alaska Press
Publication date:	02/15/2021
Series:	Permafrost Prize Series
Pages:	95
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Sara Ryan is the author of the chapbooks Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity. She is a managing editor at Iron Horse Literary Review.

Table of Contents

Self-Portrait as Mammal xiv

I

Wolf Question 3

I Thought There Would Be More Wolves 4

Your Daughter Is a Liar 5

Nesting Material 6

Prehistory 7

The Field Museum 8

Arlington Park 10

The Mackinac Pox 11

A Man Tells Me How Difficult My Body Is 12

A Man in a Bar Takes a Picture of Me 14

I Will Have Forgotten You by Sunday 15

Beast Fables 16

II

Wolf Question 21

Scrape 21

Of Men & Birds 24

Mapping My Father 26

Knives before Forks For a Moment 30

Bad Hunter 33

Raw Honey 34

Stopping Time 35

Grasp 36

Inventory 38

III

Wolf Question 43

In Praise of the Exoskeleton 44

Parenthood 46

Extinct 47

Cuffing Season 48

The Lizard That Lived Forever 50

Renovation 54

Lamb without a Mother 55

Rifle Season 56

Woolly Bones 58

Blossom Rot 60

Fever 62

Mud Ceremony 64

IV

Wolf Question 69

Call Me a Courage 70

The Girl Who Cried Wolf 71

Little Griefs 73

Favor 74

Shear 76

Glass Gravity 78

This Is the Realm of Last Chances 79

Origin of the Mapping System 80

Circumstances of Disappearance 82

Look What I Have Done 84

My Father Asks If I Was Raised by a Jackal 86

Alpha 88

Bramble and Knife 89

Acknowledgments 91

About the Author 96

Editorial Reviews

In this book the dead are searched, known, and fully articulated—the birds, the moose, the ghosts. Even if everything is “too final for its own good,” Ryan can make it live again in language.

Traci Brimhall

Ryan explores the desire to become the wolf instead of the prey animal, the thing with teeth and claws—a survivor of the forest—and the poems here embrace that wild spirit, are full of striking imagery, rich language, and emotional urgency. Visceral and raw, tender and lyrical, this is a fierce and feral debut.

Sara Eliza Johnson

In these shape-shifting poems, Sara Ryan moves back and forth between the speaker who is made of fragile flesh and the one who wants to tear that flesh from the bone. Here is a book that doesn’t flinch from the hard work of chewing on not only the bones but also the heart.

Keetje Kupers

I Thought There Would Be More Wolves offers a bold voice, fierce and vulnerable. I admire that while it engages pain it does not stay in that space of hurt but pushes beyond to what’s next.

Elizabeth Bradfield

Sara Ryan’s exquisitely wrought I Thought There Would Be More Wolves carries the charm, irony and frightening ferocity of unexpurgated fairy tales, the original stories spoken in the dusk, drawing up both bone and fur, feather and blood. This is a collection that admits transmutation. The central question being can we bear what we become any more than what we are?

Vievee Francis