In Progress

The Bird Church: Poems for Smallest Things

“Healer Confronts Holy Spirit,” by Pájara

This manuscript is a poetry chapbook, largely written in the years since returning home to San Antonio to settle. The “smallest things” of the title refers largely to the urban microfauna – the grackles, koi, roaches, cicadas, turtles, snoutnose 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 attention, The Bird Church considers “what is here”: the ordinary life that survives amid the occupations of colonial history and contemporary “development.”

Read a sample here: About a Grackle