Flightless Bird

<p><em>Flightless Bird</em> is a book of poems that explores the plight and place of flightless birds in our imaginations and in the world. Ostriches emus great auks and dodos fill the pages sharing their chronicles of resilience fetishization mockery and extinction. New stories also emerge - of disobedience irreverent women eroticism and abundance. It's a book about otherness and belonging - a collection of energetic contemporary poems that seeks to unsettle old stories.</p><p><br></p><p><em>Flightless Bird</em> is a startling debut. Sensual transformative these poems are muscular embodiments of the imagination; they reach deep into you alighting on flightlessness and the dream of flight - in both birds and humans. Energetic and pulsing with life the lines leap unflinching and the heart is buffeted as we are whisked gymnastic from the domestic interior to the biosphere via all the contraptions the image allows. A literary and ecological tightrope walk the collection dances in precise steps from soulful to encompassing. At their most poised the lyrics stretch to explore the intersections of feminine sensibility shame desire domestic womanhood cultural oppression and avian destruction all done with wry composure a balanced awareness of silences extinctions and the irrepressible urge to be alive and to be loved on the earth. The insights coalesce with quiet panache arriving from inside and from far off. The alchemy is provoking intimate and powerful. This is an exciting new ecofeminist voice: fresh exquisitely bold imbued with confident physicality yet haunted with a serene acquiescence to ecological grief. -Miriam Darlington</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>