What Bird are You by Amy Bobeda

Dogs begin to bark. It’s the coldest night of February. The snow begins to howl. I’ve been reading Percy Bysshe Shelley, and this new collection by Amy Bobeda which displays such an implacable love for life & the biosphere. The way she speaks the syntax of myth, how she recognizes birds as inscrutable people who vanish into their own lives & deaths. Isn’t it said humans first got poetry from listening to the whistle of migratory flocks? Amy Bobeda constructs rich colloquial poems, substantial as a clay pot, multi-hued as the lyric of a songbird. She reaches back, back, back, past the trees, past the city streets—till you see things you never knew before. Shelley wrote, “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?“ From the canyons of howling snow, with her book in hand I look straight into the valley of birds.  Read these poems—

–Andrew Schelling, The Jack Kerouac School, author of The Facts at Dog Tank Spring