Teaching a Wild Thing

by Kindra McDonald

aaDoes it sometimes feel like we’re walking in the museum of our future demise? A world burning or flooding, skies raging with storms; our days, rooms lined with the teeth, tusks, and plumage of creatures who like us are trying to make their way. Against this, how could a leaf be made more tender? Kindra McDonald is not the kind of poet who offers platitudes. But these poems give us everything, flawed or glistening—all kinds of wild things who live and die or are brought back from the brink. Read these poems like you’d pick figs in for the reverse blossom, and the gardens inside each one.

—Luisa A. Igloria, author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts; Poet Laureate of Virginia, Emerita


How I see myself in the tender ache reflections of the world blooming in these poems. McDonald’s Teaching a Wild Thing is a landscape of personal grief, while being found in a heron wing, tuft of bobcat, chrysalis, crab, “the space between ladybugs and petal.” This collection is an almanac of heart, supplication and prayer— “feeling/ for an answer somewhere/…a place/ that smells like home.” With the essence of Mary Oliver and conservationist Beatrix Potter, McDonald is a mother of other kingdoms, her poems “a flower that has bloomed on your tongue alone.”

—Kai Coggin, author of Mining for Stardust, Incandescent, and Wingspan


Even as McDonald writes “this language is impossible” she articulates the abstract into the
visceral and sensual, “I am holy thighs / a strawberry swelling / mint leaves floating / in peach
tea.” A literacy of wildness peppers the “lion’s mane,” “gills tender lamella,” “mountain mint and milkweed.” In Teaching a Wild Thing, Kindra McDonald is as vulnerable in her experience of agony as she is in hope.

—Angela Dribben, author of Everygirl


In Teaching a Wild Thing, Kindra McDonald blurs the line between the human and natural worlds, creating a oneness that reveals we are also wild things—fraught, at the mercy of disaster, in need of comfort. These poems lay bare the darkness of loss but always search for hope and, ultimately, discover a sort of fulfillment in caring for the small everyday blooms and creatures McDonald calls us to treasure. There is much to learn here. Follow the poet’s “instructions for joy,” and this collection will linger.

—Cynthia Marie Hoffman, author of Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones

92 pages, Paperback

Published October 21, 2022

About the author

Kindra McDonald is the author of the chapbooks Concealed Weapons, (2015) and Elements and Briars, (2016) and the full-length poetry collections, Fossils published by Finishing Line Press and In the Meat Years by Aldrich Press, both in 2019. She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte.
She teaches poetry classes at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, VA and is an adjunct writing professor. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Bettering American Poetry. She lives in the city of mermaids with her husband and cats where she bakes, hikes, and changes hobbies monthly.