Linfield Authors Book Gallery

When We Were Birds

When We Were Birds

Description

In When We Were Birds, Joe Wilkins wrests his attention away from the griefs, deprivations, and high prairies of his Montana childhood and turns toward “the bean-rusted fields & gutted factories of the Midwest,” toward ordinary injustice and everyday sadness, toward the imminent birth of his son and his own confusions in taking up the mantle of fatherhood, toward faith and grace, legacy and luck.

A panoply of voices are at play—the escaped convict, the late-night convenience store clerk, and the drowned child all have their say—and as this motley chorus rises and crests, we begin to understand something of what binds us and makes us human: while the world invariably breaks all our hearts, Wilkins insists that is the very “place / hope lives, in the breaking.”

Within a notable range of form, concern, and voice, the poems here never fail to sing. Whether praiseful or interrogating, When We Were Birds is a book of flight, light, and song. “When we were birds,” Wilkins begins, “we veered & wheeled, we flapped & looped— / it’s true, we flew.”

ISBN

9781557286970

Publication Date

2016

Publisher

University of Arkansas Press

City

Fayetteville

Disciplines

Creative Writing | Poetry

Comments

Description, cover image, and reviews courtesy of University of Arkansas Press.

Subject Areas

American poetry -- 21st century

Author/Editor Bio

Joe Wilkins is Associate Professor of English at Linfield College. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho and a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Gonzaga University.

Reviews

“Full of imaginative novelty as well as reminders that miraculous secrets are hidden in the fabric of everyday life . . . these poems show us the truth and even the dignity of ordinary experience.” - Billy Collins, author of Aimless Love

“This gritty collection from Joe Wilkins showcases how the outdoors can be a classroom for all matters of the heart: it sneaks devastating truths and disjunctions into soil and shattered rivers, into places where ‘a vole snouts / through my throat, where a tree frog’s scream / fills my heart’s dark riffle.’ When We Were Birds doesn’t just contemplate all ruin and hard work, where ‘the backs of my hands / had lustered clear to burlap or dry river mud,’ but also masterfully showcases a magnificent spill and glide of beautiful language even if the speaker begs, ‘O god/of busted wishes/ leave me here a long time here/ in the stinking dark.’” - Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Lucky Fish

“The most striking component of [Wilkins’s work] is its awareness of the whole world. What is ordinary becomes transcendent. In places derelict and seemingly unexceptional, Wilkins compels us to recognize what is worth salvage, worth praise.” - Indiana Review

When We Were Birds

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