Rewilding

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.

January Gill O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University, and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. The former executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, she currently serves on AWP’s Board of Directors. Her poem, “At the Rededication of the Emmett Till Memorial,” was a cowinner of the 2022 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil was also the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.

“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

January Gill O’Neil
Pub date – November 6, 2018
$16
ISBN  978-1-933880-68-6