The Bird Church by Marisol Cortez

In spare and intimate language, translucent and tender, Marisol Cortez’ book of poems The Bird Church,  acknowledges despair, an emotion that “…floats to the surface/like a paper flower/when my mind stops scrambling/for solutions,”  despair felt while raising sons in a world of climate change. Yet on every page, in every poem, that despair is met with Cortez’ gift of seeing and offering the beauty that remains in transient places, in the mundane or ignored like the “snoutnoses, plain brown/sparrows of the butterfly/world” or dun-colored hummingbirds “chittering away/like little dolphins/of the sky.”  In a poem about urban neighborhoods straddling the “perpetual umbra of interstate” that opens her collection, the scent of jasmine blows  “… through/wind tunnel of IH35/South as from above/it whistles, as I’ve said before,/like the waves trapped in miniature/within the enameled pink ear/of the conch.” The poet’s rare sensitivity revealed in that exquisite and startling image reverberates through this entire collection in poems that explore the sometimes troubled legacy of grandfathers or centuries of colonial subjugation in South Texas, setting these truths alongside the joyous sight of wild parrots perched in mesquite trees or the irrepressible cry of a chip-stealing grackle.  I feel grateful to have spent some hours in Marisol Cortez’ Bird Church, a sanctuary I intend to return to again and again for sustenance.

–Mobi Warren, author of Thread and Nectar

The Bird Church by Marisol Cortez is a loving gift to San Antonio, her children, and the environments she is raising them in as a mother and writer-activist. These poems draw connections between the mechanical infrastructure of the city and the wounds, divides, and disruptions on the serenity of nature. Humans and birds adapt and hold their spirit up despite interruptions from the building of roads, trucks plowing through, and even the noise and air pollution that comes with these in the form of honking and black billowing smoke from exhaust pipes, “…because we/ have made the oceans/ so acidic/ with cars/ and trucks/ and stacks//So when it comes down to it/ isn’t putting a toy car/ into the hands/ of a child/ like handing him/ toy guns to play with?” Cortez shares her private connections with her children and extended family in subtle snapshot moments lyrically and seems to resolve, much like the resolve humans and birds have with the disrupted manmade infrastructure of a city, the structural barriers between them. Community is found in the harmony of nature, despite industrial and familial fissures.

–Viktoria Valenzuela