Wild: An Elemental Journey

Totally unique in voice and content, Jay Griffiths' Wild: An Elemental Journey, is a rich wilderness of provocative images and ideas. She takes the reader on a journey of wild places and wild elements, weaving together historical fact with poetic wonder. This book honors the feminine voice--the writers own--as well as the voice of the Earth. At times she sings to us; at times she screams. But she does not waver in her assertions of the crimes we humans--Europeans and Americans, especially--have committed against our land and our people and how off course we have gotten from our own wild natures. At times sobering, at other times hilariously irreverent, Wild is not a book for everyone. But I would argue that it is a book for anyone who is willing to have their perceptions challenged and their psychic laundry aired out on a cold, blustery spring day. The book is both alarming and refreshing. Jay Griffiths is a "shaman/fool" who gives her readers permission to join her in the sacred cause.

An utter wonder of a book, at once vulnerable and ferocious, elegiac and giddy. It's a work that honestly engages the many-voiced vitality of the earth in all its elemental weirdness, a polyphonic fugue written in a style that for once matches the intensity of its topic. Luminously awake, politically astute, without a doubt "Wild" is the expression of a uniquely capacious intelligence, the song of a heart pulsing with compassion for divergent places and creatures as they weather the insanity of contemporary civilization. Yet it's written with abundant empathy for the human animal, too, in its instinctive eloquence and its institutional stupidities. The author's rage sometimes nudges her into over-facile dichotomizing, but the polymorphous exuberance of her imagination steadily bursts the bounds of any black-and-white theorizing. Meanwhile, her keen attunement to the music of language - and to the rootedness of words in the more-than-human soundscape of wave-surge and cricket-rhythm and thunder - enlivens this work with a magic that provokes the involvement of all one's senses. It's a deliciously erotic read.

Having just finished reading "Wild: An Elemental Journey" by our associate Jay Griffiths, we at Bracketpress are for once lost for words ... and as so many express our feelings more articulately we offer the following ... "A major book by a major writer...powerful and uncompromising... she writes like four kinds of gorgeous, so deep in love with the world that when the right word isn't there she simply births it... a majestic anthropology" - Bill McKibben, The Ecologist "I used to think the wild did not have words, that it lay beyond the edge of logic and expression. With her journey and her struggle, Jay Griffiths proves me wrong...Her words are intense, episodic, gripping, and sensual, somewhere between Edward Abbey and Jeanette Winterson-who knew there was such a place? Wild is the first great nature writing of the 21st century." - David Rothenberg, author of Why Birds Sing and Wild Ideas. "Insightful, effervescent and lavishly written...She shrouds her amazingly strenuous physical journey with a rich literary penumbra. The book has a profusion of historical allusions and a fertile bibliography; the vivid, excited writing draws haunting, lovely connections among multiple cultures, landscapes and ideas." - Ruth Padel, The Washington Post. "Passionate, rigorous and utterly honest, Griffiths' remarkable book is written in a style as wild and exciting as its subject." - Robert Macfarlane, author of Mountains of the Mind. "Like Thoreau, Jay Griffiths wants to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life....an immersionist... [her] research is impressive... [her] writing dexterous and lush... a passionate plea for the preservation of wilderness." - New York Times "Wholly original...Griffiths's project is wildness itself, in all the philosophical glory that the 'sublime' held for the Romantics... Griffiths is fascinated by, and fascinating on, wild language, and her writing builds in extraordinary poetic sequences.... Indeed, of the many literary elements that make up the book - travelogue, memoir, journal, reportage, extended essay on feminism, sociology, anthropology, religion, ecology and geopolitics - it is probably poetry that comes closest to defining this undefinable and untameable work. Perhaps its most remarkable achievement is its own quality of wildness. Wild is alive with its subject. Language is thrown around in the most earthy, vital way... A vital, unique and uncategorisable celebration of the spirit of life wherever it is found, Wild is a profound and extraordinary piece of work. - Ian Beetlestone, The Observer "An exuberant and erudite exploration of the meaning of wilderness and its place in our lives... Griffiths' love for words and her skill in using them, her easy familiarity with a host of poets, novelists, naturalists and anthropologists...her willingness to reveal so much of herself, make this a fascinating journey." - Kirkus Reviews "A book of staggering power, honesty and wit" - BBC Wildlife Magazine. "Jay G