When We Were Birds: Poems
By Joe Wilkins
()
About this ebook
Finalist, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
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.”
Winner, 2017 Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry, Oregon Book Awards
Related to When We Were Birds
Related ebooks
The Best American Poetry 2012: Series Editor David Lehman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Best American Poetry 2019 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Eternal Sentences Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Best American Poetry 2003: Series Editor David Lehman Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Best American Poetry 1997 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Best American Poetry 2010: Series Editor David Lehman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Eternal City: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Don't Go Back to Sleep Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The River Twice: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsKing Me Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5July Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLightning Falls in Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Vault Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDialogues with Rising Tides Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flood Song Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Wendys Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIs, Is Not Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jab Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5All You Ask For is Longing: New and Selected Poems: New and Selected Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Moons of August Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This Brighter Prison: A Book of Journeys Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTravel Alarm Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Twice Told Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Human Line Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The New Clean Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWind, Trees Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA House Called Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Poetry from Copper Canyon Press Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlackbird and Wolf: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Best American Poetry 2013 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Galleons: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Poetry For You
The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Things We Don't Talk About Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Thoughts: An Exploration Of Who We Are Beyond Our Minds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of John Keats (with an Introduction by Robert Bridges) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Road Not Taken and other Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Waste Land and Other Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Collection of Poems by Robert Frost Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for When We Were Birds
0 ratings0 reviews