Written in the years after returning home to South Texas, The Bird Church tends to the urban microfauna—the grackles, koi, chicharras, cosmos, feral parrots, snoutnosed butterflies, but also the ornamental fruit and children—which persist in the unsupervised scars of highways and inland refineries. Less a poetry of witness than of careful attention, The Bird Church considers “what is here”: the ordinary life that persists and survives amid the occupations of colonial history and its current climate and political crises.
Cover art by the inimitable Alice “Pájara” Canestaro-Garcia
Excerpts: “Found Fruit” and “Cars and Trucks,” video poems originally produced for URBAN-15’s 2020 Mega Corazón:
Reader Testimonials
“Poems that explore the sometimes troubled legacy of grandfathers or centuries of colonial subjugation in South Texas, setting these truths alongside the joyous sight of wild parrots perched in mesquite trees or the irrepressible cry of a chip-stealing grackle.”
–Mobi Warren, Author of Thread and Nectar and The Bee Maker
“Humans and birds adapt and hold their spirit up despite interruptions from the building of roads, trucks plowing through, and even the noise and air pollution that comes with these in the form of honking and black billowing smoke from exhaust pipes, so that “when it comes down to it/ isn’t putting a toy car/ into the hands/ of a child/ like handing him/ toy guns to play with?”
—Viktoria Valenzuela, Poet and Associate Publisher of Conocimientos Press