Feather & Bone by Kathleen Williamson – NWVS #165

$15.99

 

How could I resist a book titled Feather & Bone? In the wake of a horrific act of human violence, these poems meditate on daily violences in the natural world. Vultures circle, hungry birds plunge into windows, and an owl spends the night cutting up his victims. A stranger lurking in the shadows reminds the speaker that she is also prey to forces beyond her control. And yet, these are not poems of unrelenting despair, but a life-affirming celebration of the “thumping heart of it all.” Braiding images of beauty and brutality, poet Kathleen Williamson finds music in the inevitable cruelties of survival.
–Jackie Craven, author of Cyborg Sister, Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters, and others

 

Part field guide, part confession, Kathleen Williamson‘s Feather & Bone studies human nature with the careful eye of an ornithologist. From brooding to migration, Williamson asks us to re-examine our relationship not only to the natural world but to the ties and traditions we dare call humanity. These poems are anything but hollow-boned, and yet, page after page, they take flight.

–Stacey Balkun, author of Sweetbitter

 

Description

Feather & BoneNWVS #165

by Kathleen Williamson

$15.99, paper

979-8-88838-041-3

2022

Feather & Bone by Kathleen Williamson is, on its face, a keen observation of the wildness of nature all around us, but below the surface it teems with the wildness in us, the churning emotions of human relationships – fear, horror, confusion, as well as tenderness and devotion. Many of the poems are set in small pockets of wilderness in New York City, where to find a tree brimming with ibis, you must trudge through broken glass, and warbler calls are drowned out by the sound of sirens. Williamson wrestles with the darkness, but continues to venture into it – listening for predators while letting mosquitos sing in her ears. In the end, she revels being within the thumping heart of it all, and finds the wonder that is necessary to endure.

Kathleen Williamson won the runner-up prize in the SLAB poetry contest and was a winner in the Poetry in the Pavement project in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Her work has been published in Poetry International Online Quarterly, Newtown Literary, Ponder Review, as well other literary journals. She is on the board of Saw Mill River Audubon and Films on Purpose and lives in Pleasantville, New York.

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