At times alchemical, at times medicinal, at times invasive, the bird enters the poet’s body with an imaginative force that dazzles. The poet brings other registers into her work—the illness of her mother, the death of an uncle—expanding into a pathos for her beloveds. Together with travels both actual and metaphysical, Zoë Fay-Stindt exquisitely portrays our landscapes, though they be beautiful or damaged, as she celebrates and laments the wet, maternal earth of our home planet. Don’t miss this splendid collection!

—Barbara Ras, author of The Blues of Heaven, The Last Skin, and One Hidden Stuff

As I hold the body of this book in my hands, it sings. Here is a body as “a series of openings,” as medical subject, as subject and object of violence, as a mother’s echo, a cypress tree. Here is a body honing its emphatic no and its exuberant yes, forgiving what it has had to do to survive; to become, once again, the self.

—Jody Chan, author of sick, all our futures, and haunt

A seamlessly woven lyric, rich with evocative imagery and tight language, this book is steeped in its own delicate, precise mythology. Within these pages, reader and poet “curl and press into each other, two willow tendrils,” trusting in this avian excavation of body, of scar, of pink wet flesh threaded with fingers, touch, beak, crabgrass, mud, heron, hyacinth. A brilliant incantation of wound searching, Fay-Stindt rearranges your bones with her words, leaves you a changed being. These poems transmute trauma to wild Spirit rising over untouched horizon, scar turned wing, silent fight lifting into glorious boundless flight.

—Kai Coggin, author of Mining for Stardust, Incandescent, and Wingspan