In the bird museum
By Kristy Bowen
2008
First Published
4.41
Average Rating
110
Number of Pages
I was apprenticed to the frenzied atmosphere, the verandas that open into dark wind.... Bowen is apprenticed to the “frenzied atmosphere" and in it she finds the crucial minutiae, in it she finds skirts of night and a woman’s heart as a wind-up bird. Bowen’s poetry is where we go to read that heart—as old- time paper valentine and as fist of flesh: valved and valued...letters written with the bones of birds. So it is, so it was that Here, we came for the ghost of the word/ inside the other word: and here, in the bird museum we are haunted by all that is visual as it is visceral and Bowen, playful, brilliant, curator, reminds us that this place is a synaesthete’s playground—where the eye partakes in the delicious but no less-so than the ear, for here: If you listen, you can hear the holes in the alphabet, sounds lit by the lamps of our bones. Like birds we might even rise, our lamp-lit bones: luminous and... fly in a perfect line. Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis
Avg Rating
4.41
Number of Ratings
32
5 STARS
59%
4 STARS
28%
3 STARS
6%
2 STARS
6%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads
Author
Kristy Bowen
Author · 6 books
A writer and book artist working in both text and image, Kristy Bowen is the author of a number of chapbook, zine, and artists book projects, as well as six full-length collections of poetry/prose/hybrid work, including the recent SALVAGE (Black Lawrence Press, 2016) and MAJOR CHARACTERS IN MINOR FILMS (Sundress Publications, 2015). Bowen holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College and an MA in Literature from DePaul University. She lives in Chicago, where she runs dancing girl press & studio and spends much of her time writing, making papery things, and editing a chapbook series devoted to women authors. Her seventh book of poems, LITTLE APOCALYPSE, is due out from Noctuary Press in 2018. Another collection, SEX & VIOLENCE will be published in Spring 2020 by Black Lawrence.
