Poetry. BIRD BOOK is written in collaboration with a field guide to North American birds. Each page both borrows and departs from language found in an individual bird entry. The resulting text is an investigation into dissolved and dissolving narrative, into the permeable boundaries between "human" and "natural," and into the partial and shifting nature of narrative and memory themselves, "wet and traveling maps." Here, as in bird song, gap and repetition create their own story. To welcome "accidental field," "to take the songbird out of your mouth," to examine the ever-shifting relationship between what we receive and what we project, is to move through a porous and shared space, affecting and affected, where "yellow spectacle" hovers over "a suggested house": "exuberant ground."

Author City: BERKELEY, CA USA

Laura Walker grew up in rural North Carolina and now lives in Berkeley, California. She is the author of rimertown/ an atlas (University of California Press, 2008), swarm lure (Battery Press, 2004), and the chapbook bird book (Albion Books, 2010). She is the recipient of a Fund for Poetry grant and the Ann Fields Poetry Award, and she teaches poetry at University of San Francisco's MFA in Writing Program and UC Berkeley Extension. She spends most of her time being a mom to Ben, 6, and Theo, 4.