Overrun By Wild Boars

There are many things one hopes to avoid being overrun by: unpaid bills, enthusiastic relatives, government paperwork and, perhaps most alarmingly, wild boars. The latter are notoriously indifferent to personal boundaries, garden fences and the conventions of polite society. Fortunately, Maia Elsner’s Overrun by Wild Boars (2021) is not primarily a practical guide to surviving an unexpected invasion of aggressive woodland mammals, although it does concern itself with considerably more formidable forces.

Published by Flipped Eye Publishing, this striking debut poetry collection explores history, identity, memory, persecution and the extraordinary human determination to survive circumstances that would seem designed to make survival thoroughly unreasonable.

Elsner draws upon a rich and complicated family heritage spanning Polish and Mexican cultures, Jewish history, multiple languages and generations of displacement. Her poems travel across centuries and continents, moving between ancient Rome, medieval Cairo, twentieth-century Europe, contemporary London and Mexico City. It is an ambitious itinerary for a relatively slim volume, particularly considering that most travel guides struggle to cover one city without becoming hopelessly repetitive.

Yet this is no conventional journey through picturesque destinations and agreeable historical landmarks. Elsner is concerned with what history does to people, how families carry the consequences of events long after they have officially concluded, and how personal identity emerges from an often bewildering inheritance of cultures, memories and experiences.

The collection confronts colonial exploitation, genocide, migration and the persistence of trauma, while searching for intimacy, beauty and resilience amid the wreckage. It asks what people preserve, what they lose and how the past continues to inhabit the present, frequently without having the courtesy to knock first.

Elsner’s poetry is formally adventurous, moving between different poetic structures and experimenting with language to capture experiences that resist simple explanation. Art, architecture, mythology and collective memory provide unexpected points of connection, demonstrating that a building, painting or inherited story may contain considerably more history than its outward appearance suggests.

There is something wonderfully defiant about the enterprise. Civilisations collapse, borders shift, governments issue proclamations and entire communities are uprooted, yet fragments of language, family memory and cultural identity stubbornly survive. History may be written by the victors, but poetry has a rather inconvenient habit of remembering everybody else.

Published in 2021, Overrun by Wild Boars introduces a distinctive poetic voice, combining intellectual curiosity, emotional intensity and imaginative experimentation. It is an absorbing collection for readers interested in contemporary poetry, cultural identity, historical memory and the complicated business of belonging somewhere when one’s heritage stretches across half the planet.

Condition: Good. A previously owned copy showing ordinary signs of reading and handling, but remaining perfectly capable of introducing another reader to its remarkable contents.

Offered by Crappy Old Books, where we have considerable sympathy for anyone attempting to preserve culture, memory and civilisation against overwhelming odds. We also strongly discourage wild boars from entering the premises, particularly as they have demonstrated absolutely no interest in purchasing second-hand literature.

A thoughtful, inventive and occasionally unsettling collection proving that even when history behaves like a herd of rampaging animals, poetry can still find something worth saving.

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