The Bones of Winter Birds

The Bones of Winter Birds is a book of belonging and seeking, ribboned through with the heat of the South and the body—“salt-stained, rain-scarred, the body wants its forgetfulness and honey.” Love comes in lines of grief and fear, but these poems are also built on the very satisfying nestling-in to ordinary life. Throughout, Fisher-Wirth finds a melancholic reckoning. “Like a summer creek the mother dries up / in me…Enough. All that worrying. // Clawfoot, bone, beak and feather: now let be.” Her explorations embed salvaged memories and family concerns, with one rich section devoted to an older sister who didn’t want to be known. This collection is unafraid to share longing and loss equally. —Lauren Camp

The Bones of Winter Birdsis much about loss, as its title announces: grief attenuates the world, and so doing reveals its most intricate architecture. In Fisher-Wirth’s poems, however, this process is compensated by an attendant richness. What vanishes returns, in memory and in dream; what remains is simply life itself, which concentrates and takes on luminosity. “He screams once,” one poem begins, and another, “Here you see a treasure.” These are the poles of this book. The bones of birds are delicate, and invisible while the creature lives. Like these poems, they are fragile and incisive and essential. This is a lovely and moving book. —T. R. Hummer