Birds in the City by Jennifer Brinkley

“Even the strongest rope unravels over time,” Jennifer Brinkley writes in the opening poem of Birds in the City, centering the reader on the collection’s central theme: that love and time are paradoxical in the ways in which they both bind and fray, producing, in these deeply felt and finely rendered poems, a persona and poetic voice urgent and attentive to grief and joy in their many incarnations.  “Scratching at the door of yesterday,” the poet enters into the past as if it were as much a dream as a memory and bears witness to the lives of the poet’s beloveds, rendering them fully and lyrically seen in this strong collection.

–Jonathan Fink, author of The Crossing and Barbarossa: The German Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Siege of Leningrad.

Birds in the City is a compelling collection that offers multiple voices of women from youth to old age.  With strong images and powerful characters, Brinkley explores the challenges women face as they persevere as they “refuse to stop moving forward.”

–Sylvia Woods, author of What We Take With Us

Some Birds get fat on crumbs.  Others end up caged.  Some birds dream of being earthworms, “feeling around in the dark…and forever fearing the fall of rain.”  In Birds in the City, Brinkley offers poems about the floods that come once the levee breaks.  While some poets are content to skim the surface, Brinkley dives into the big, hard subjects:  surviving childhood abuse, divorce, the trials of raising a child, the loss of a parent.  These are second act poems that muddle through the middle, among “the flags standing at half-mast…yearning to be at the top again.”  Just as some birds fly away, some poems—transcendent poems such as these—“pedal against the wind.”

–Tom C. Hunley, author of What Feels Like Love:  New and Selected Poems