Mangold, Sarah: Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners

Fordham University Press, paperback

Publication Date: October 5, 2021

Publisher Marketing: A feminist poetics exploring gender, landscape and the idea of a "natural body"

"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 "The Brain Scoop" & host of PBS Prehistoric Road Trip

"Sarah Mangold's poetry of preservation is kin to Susan Howe's archival work. It is both haunted and haunting." ---Rae Armantrout

"Patriarchy conflates women with nature while erasing their names from the history of science. Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners corrects patriarchy on both counts, naming and celebrating women naturalists who worked in the field and in museums. Mangold brings these adventurous and resourceful women out of the acknowledgment pages of others' books and into the foreground of her own, highlighting in the process how science, in the guise of objectivity, dresses the natural world in conspicuous artifice. Using verbal and visual collage to evoke and trouble the tropes of collecting, preserving, classifying, and displaying specimens, Mangold fashions out of a trove of found fragments a fabulous feminist Wunderkammer, 'proof of woman's work' that does not disavow 'its feminine identity.'" ---Brian Teare