ABSTRACT
In the 1990s Hogan brought out what is probably her most famous volume of poetry: The Book of Medicines (1993), which solidified her position on the poetic scene. This chapter explores the importance of wildness for the author's revisioning of human-animal relationship.
While the volume's ecofeminist focus is still clearly visible, Hogan is now more devoted to exploring the world of primal instincts, like fear and hunger, but also love and compassion. The destructive-regenerative potential of every person, she claims, seems to depend on how we tap into our primordial animality. By fragmenting the pre-verbal unity of life, expelling primordial wildness beyond the pale of familiarity, and reducing inconceivably complex nonhuman animals to exploitable commodities, humans removed food from the realm of the ensouled and turned wildness into a threat. Still, there exist members of an ancient “clan of crossings” who remind us of our shared, interspecies history and our human status as the less evolved, younger siblings. To Hogan, the future of the human is bound up with them
