Hawk’s Cry by Mary Pacifico Curtis

What strikes me the most about Hawk’s Cry is how distinctive the voice is. “Canary in rare olive, / Throated, / golden trills” describes a bird in one of these poems, but that description could also be evoked to describe these rare poems. Wise, yet vulnerable, Mary Pacifico Curtis truly grapples with the human condition in ways that most poets only wish to do.

–Charlotte Pence, author of Code, 2020 Book of the Year from Alabama Poetry Society

In Hawk’s Cry, the latest collection by Mary Pacifico Curtis, we are given a cry of pain and beauty, gods and prisons, Ai Weiwei, Greta Thunberg, and so much more—with Sinatra crooning from the past as we learn “the wisdom of the calendar.” Hawk’s Cry is a formally inventive collection, with meditations that span the concerns of the human heart while navigating a spiritual journey. It manages to be both restless in its curiosity and philosophical in its tender-hearted gaze.

–Brian Turner, My Life as a Foreign Country

At its heart, Hawk’s Cry is “Kintsukuroi.” But it is not broken pottery Mary P. Curtis mends with the shimmering, golden yoke of her wisdom. What she hands the reader is the gift of an imperfect, fragmented life fused into an exquisite whole. Broken histories, broken families, broken bodies, and broken minds—none of these impairments need prevent a meaningful, beautiful life, Curtis shows us. And it’s not just the past that can be gilded with perspective. To the dangers of now and future times, to the hawks, ever present and circling overhead, we can say: from you I gain the strength to meet you. Hawk’s Cry is a triumphant book and a reminder that despite it all, it is a great gift to be human.

–Melissa Studdard, author of Dear Selection Committee and I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast