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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.
Stunning. Sarah Mangold's poetry gives voice to the care, beauty and expertise these naturalists devoted to their craft—an attention to detail historically overlooked, but thankfully gaining wider appreciation within the words of Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners.---Emily Graslie, former Chief Curiosity Correspondent at the Chicago Field Museum, creator of Brain Scoop & host of PBS Pre-historic Road Trip
Sarah Mangold’s poetry of preservation is kin to Susan Howe’s archival work. It is both haunted and haunting.---Rae Armantrout, author of Conjure
. . .Readers who enjoy experimental, genre-bending, collage-like poetry will find themselves enthralled.
In Sarah Mangold’s bold fourth collection, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners, the definition of “woman’s work” changes. Highlighting the contributions of both taxidermist and naturalist Martha Maxwell and Delia Akeley, the wife of “the father of modern taxidermy,” Mangold examines the perception of women who existed in and made significant advances in a male-dominated field. Relying on language and imagery extracted from historical natural-history texts and taxidermy manuals, Mangold’s poetry also explores an aspect of the female experience that defies discipline and cultures–what it means to be erased.
Sarah Mangold is the author of the poetry collections Household Mechanics (New Issues, selected by C. D. Wright for the New Issues Prize), Electrical Theories of Femininity (Black Radish Books), and Giraffes of Devotion (Kore). She is the recipient of a 2013 NEA Poetry Fellowship, as well as support from MacDowell, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Willapa Bay AIR, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Whiteley Center at Friday Harbor Labs, Seattle Arts Commission and Artist Trust. She lives in Edmonds, Washington.
Foreword | vii
Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners | 1
Notes & | 81