In her debut poetry collection, A Little Feral, Maria Giesbrecht pulls a little god from her mouth. Don’t take my word for it. Ask the mangled woman laying in a parking lot in one of the collection’s pivotal poems. The woman who “birthed / a voice the size of her life.” This image, feral and unsettling, encapsulates the theme of the collection: renewal through rupture. Written in the wake of leaving a conservative Mennonite fundamentalist religion, the poems echo an ancestry of running, both away from and toward something. Each of the five sections take the reader on a wild and tender journey as Giesbrecht—a disciple, daughter, woman, lover—attempts to break God and put him back together on her own terms. Every poem is steeped in the “desire / to get away with survival” which for Giesbrecht, means both burning and building bridges to her past. This journey, however, is not linear; it follows a spiraled model of time, wherein we move forward with the poet as she repeats patterns in order to outgrow them and where past echoes return at higher decibels. Through this coiling, the poems themselves become containers she uncorks in order to “seduce an exit” and come home to herself. 

What is unique about this collection is that it’s not a searing indictment of her oppressive upbringing or dysfunctional family dynamics. Rather, Giesbrecht’s voice is defiant and measured, never spilling over into rage, even as she dismantles a formidable God, an alcoholic father, and the violent history of obedience in its many forms. She is neither a sinner craving redemption nor a saint flirting with disaster. She understands that, perhaps, she can get away with being both. Throughout the collection she yearns to find holiness in unlikely, even profane, places, without being precious about her moral code: 

               I want to be a good person

               even though I lasso my neck towards death,

               dip my finger into the sunset before my elders

               have eaten. I am a jar of marmalade. I am a lid.

               I am a fool with a right grip. There’s nothing left

               except for me. For me.

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               (from “I still want to be a good person”)

Giesbrecht juggles this paradox by using language that is both leaping and flowing. Her diction is precise and unexpected, delicate and raw: “We are quickly fucked / under a sunset, like lace in an oven.” She is a master at choosing words and breaking lines in a way that balances unflinching honesty with lyrical whimsy. As a result, each poem has a satisfying ratio of savory to sweet, with just a hint of acidity to cleanse the palate for the next one. In the vein of this analogy, the mouth is a recurring symbol in these poems — consuming, vomiting, nourishing. The mouth of the collection is carnal, intimate, hungry to speak. It eats body parts (the anatomical imagery is striking: eyelashes, freckles, collarbones, ankles, ribs) and digests them as spiritual revelations:

How you surrendered is not a mystery. 

Or a miracle. Knees like potholes, 

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hips like that broken Ford in first gear. No, 

you remember the silk spit in your mouth,

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thick and tart from fleeing. The border guards and their fish

and fur hands. There is no pretty way to save yourself.

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(from “You might have to run for a hundred miles in the desert”)

There is a sense that the body is being written into existence in a way that was forbidden in the context of Giesbrecht’s Mennonite upbringing.  It’s as if she’s learning to grow it from scratch, piece by piece, teaching it to store pleasure alongside the pain, wisdom alongside the lesson. She’s peeling it away from memory, giving it back to her inner child: “A body is a sticker / book, a child’s introduction to memory.” 

In each section, Giesbrecht offers us a glimpse at these memories through the pastoral imagery of her past: cattle, corn husks, trucks, chicken shit, the color brown. One quick spin of the kaleidoscope and the memory becomes a dream, a wish, a longing. The images soften: we see a robin’s nest, freckles fluttering, white birds, a silk scarf, warm potatoes. “Some things, / when rearranged, just work themselves out,” she suggests in “Rats and stars.” And they do.  Instead of disorienting, these linguistic leaps feel hypnotic and immersive, inviting the reader to enter and exit the collection through a double-swinging door.  The poet is invested in a third option when it comes to the choice between “freedom or the beautiful ache of coming too close.” As a result, every poem feels like a room built to transcend that dichotomy, a shared hallucination between Giesbrecht and the reader: a way in can be a way out.  

Giesbrecht’s style is reminiscent of magical realism, resisting chronology and the internal logic of narrative in order to hold the real and imagined at once. The collection does on the page what the poet is doing in her lived experience — alchemizing the obedience of constraint (the body, the poem, the relationship, the god) into the reverence of it: “these closed circuits, like jaws, are saving us.” In this way, she is able to construct a world in which to reconcile her inherited past with the act of birthing herself anew.  It can be a lonely home, she suggests, this tangled wilderness of self: “To be born / again is to give birth to yourself alone.” But don’t worry, the door now swings both ways.