Each section of Sara Ryan’s poetry collection begins with a different “Wolf Question,” a poem in two parts—the first about a wolf, the second about a girl. Yet, both the wolf and the girl are at different turns lost, hungry, cold, living and surviving, and each part calls to the other in a way that blurs the line separating them. Throughout the book we experience this shapeshifting along with repeated images of blood, teeth, bones and fur that highlight “the animal in all / our skins.” It’s as if we’re immersed in the folklore of a far north country—full of danger, grief, loneliness and pain, but also full of courage and beauty. As Ryan writes in the poem “Grasp”: “a miracle, / maybe, how the earth shudders beneath / us, how we dance along the fractures.” I Thought There Would Be More Wolves is available Here.
Kathy Davis 