BLINDED BIRDS by B. Fulton Jennes

For those of us who lost our light early, for whom a ferocious hunger took the place of a good thing we could count on, who spent years in the dark searching for a fix of light, and who eventually found that it was softly knocking from within us all these years, B. Fulton Jennes‘ Blinded Birds is the book that knows just where you’ve been. This is a book of immense courage, of pain, of remembrance, but more than anything, it is a poetic compass for those who might never have had one to guide them through, a reminder that healing comes to us all in time. What a soul-weave of a book.

–James Diaz, author of This Someone I Call Stranger and All Things Beautiful Are Bent; poetry editor at Anti-Heroin Chic

Anne Carson has famously said “poetry is not therapy.” I agree. It’s better than therapy; it can create art from suffering. B. Fulton Jennes’s Blinded Birds is an unflinching examination of the speaker’s addiction as well as that of the speaker’s daughter. The harsh realities of inherited alcoholism, overdose, relapse, and recovery are exquisitely detailed in these brutally honest poems. Jennes’s references to poets who have mined grief before her—Emily Dickinson, W.H. Auden, Jericho Brown—shows us that for Jennes, poetry is hope—that elusive thing with feathers that sings for her, despite the pain.

–Jennifer Franklin, author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018) and If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023)

Reserved, formal, harrowing: this is the narrative voice of Blinded Birds, B. Fulton Jennes’ poetic saga of what addiction psychiatrists call the Family Illness. Looking to genetics, to generations of destructive familial habits and behaviors, to trauma, and to maternal deprivation, the narrator of this book weaves a labrynthine first-person account of a mother and her child’s individual struggles with addiction. Although separated in time, the daughter’s journey draws the mother – now in recovery – back into a similar period of her life to relive her own dance with death. These are brave and beautiful poems that many readers will find both aesthetically rewarding and highly relatable as they grapple with similar situations in their own families.

 —Kate Daniels, author of In the Months of My Son’s Recovery (LSU Press, 2019), Three Syllables Describing Addiction (Bull City Press, 2018), and The White Wave (Pitt Poetry Series, 1984); Edwin Mims professor of English, Vanderbilt University.