paper • 72 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-884800-99-3

Wolf and Pilot

Farrah Field

In the innovative world of Farrah Field’s Wolf and Pilot, magic and fantasy seep through the cracks of actuality to engender a creepy, comical narrative centered on four runaway girls, a detective, a witchmother, and a beloved teacher. Half-phantoms, half-feral animals, the runaways tiptoe through Field’s poems, hiding from a grotesque mother who “can pull her face off at the nostril” while seeking everyday childish delights: “We want our tongues blue with lollipops. / The little one thinks she would like bubble gum ice cream.” Through this intersection of the bizarre and the quotidian, eeriness rises. These poems resemble dreams, nightmares, and reality as they redefine the poetic narrative.

Field melds together fragments of each sister’s voice to create a collective consciousness, where the girls know each other’s words and thoughts before they are spoken aloud: “The girls can talk just by thinking.” Bound to this girlhood closeness, these poems reach into the world of fairytales and explore that world through a voyeuristic eye with the creative attentiveness oft unique to a child: “We think her ear looks like a fetus.” Collectively, these poems remind us that “Girls are prey to everything,” for even as the sisters build a reality that is presumed to be safe— we cannot forget the witch-mother: “Someone’s always watching, / but never where you think.”

 

“Red Onion Paper,” from Wolf and Pilot:

See the crocodile noses as they sleep in the water.

Whoever thought a body could hang like that.

Suspended in the pond, bottomless brown.

When we swim, we’ll roll our hair around our faces one hundred times.

A pair of claws works as good as hands.

The crocodiles will assume we’re already caught.

They won’t trust the commotion.

We avoid being eaten by pretending the thing has already eaten.

There could be a bus-sized catfish down there.

Our mother drinks the debris in a mug.

Our mother waits behind a log.

With her hair caught on the reeds and her mouth open.

Praise by Claire Hero
Praise from Publishers Weekly
Praise by Kristina Marie Darling from Pleiades

“Under our fresh outfits,” declare the sisters in Farrah Field’s newest book, “we’re variations of wolves at best.” I can think of no better description of these poems. In Wolf and Pilot, in language that stitches a caustic humor onto worn velvet, we meet the sisters, four girls mothered by a witch. Think Alcott’s Little Women turned streetwise and feral. Aided by the detective, we pursue them into the seedy, lovely world of girls. Wolf and Pilot is dangerous and enchanting.” —Claire Hero

“’Girls are prey to everything’ in Farrah Field’s second book, a dark sequence about twisted domesticity that speaks from an insular, sisterly ‘we’: ‘We are stronger than blackbirds,’ Field writes, ‘we don’t know what anything means we put our/ hands on the cool glass called a window./ Once upon a time all adults used to be children.’ People appear and reappear throughout four unnamed sections, becoming haunting figures in silhouette: the detective, the witch/mother, the teacher. Field mimics childhood’s flailing attempts at sense making through narrative gestures cut short in favor of whimsical leaps: ‘I heard you love falling./ How come dress up the detective doesn’t?/ It’s a party! It’s a date! It’s a party!’ A little bit bildungsroman, a little bit fairy tale, these poems feel constantly urgent: ‘Walking around a grieving household/ makes out ink it could be picked up/ in the palm and put in the oven./ Come on, little house. Say something.’ But Field writes, ‘We can never be too aware of what’s really being said,’ and throughout these poems, because we can never become fully privy to sisters’ experiences, what’s being said could mean wildly different, and powerful, things to different readers.” —Publishers Weekly

“In Farrah Field’s stunning second collection of poems, Wolf and Pilot, challenges to traditional narrative structures are presented within the guise of more conventional literary forms.” Read the full review in the winter issue (volume 31.4) of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing (& Reviews).