Zaina Alsous — A Theory of Birds

Description

University of Arkansas Press, 2019

Bonaparte and Darwish, Nazis and America, Picasso’s mistress and Columbus’s sirens. Also, dodo bird and nutmeg, placenta and carcass, and found maps––the interpretations of war. Winner of the 2019 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, selected by Hayan Charara and Fady Joudah. These poems wrestle with the intergenerational transference of trauma and the ecological disasters of militarism and colonization. What can one do for survival? How do birds fly when the sky ends? Alsous writes, “I mutated to be beautiful.” This is a collection of recalibration, and with a deep belief in collaboration, this is a collection of plural beginnings.

––Jeric Smith

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