About Meg Kearney
Meg Kearney is the author of two full-length collections of poems, An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now, winner of the 2010 PEN New England L.L. Winship Award, as well as a heroic crown published as a chapbook titled The Ice Storm, a trilogy of novels in verse for teens, and the picture book Trouper. She directs the Solstice MFA Program in Massachusetts.
Praise for All Morning the Crows
This book goes well beyond a metaphoric treatment of birds and their habits. Instead, their differing characteristics comprise a jumping-off point for a mythology of selfhood—a lens through which to examine and confront a personal history. The catalog of birds illustrates how happenstance and speculation determine who she is. Untranslatable and mysterious as any mythology, a various history of a changeable self accumulates in these inventive, charged, and often ecstatic poems. Meg Kearney’s poems both delight and complicate—at heart a spirit as unknowable and evocative as the birds themselves.
—Cleopatra Mathis, author of After the Body and Book of Dog
“Before I was born I was biggest of the clutch, already a burden / and slow to hatch,” Meg Kearney writes in her long-awaited and remarkable bird book—which is about birds and so much more. Against the backdrop of her parents’ death, the trauma of the Towers, and pervasive self-doubt, a young woman traces her history of flight, offering a narrative of heartbreak spliced with humor and filtered through the raucous assemblages of birds which inhabit her, “singing in the cage my bones make.” If birds provide music (“She just likes to say grackle, a crack-your- / knuckles, hard-candy word”) and spiritual sustenance (“the soul is a sparrow”), they also allow the narrator to negotiate her habitat: “’Bird seed—it’s in your hair,’ / my mother said, reaching for me.” Meg Kearney has crafted a dazzling book of personal transformations, moving and memorable.
—Michael Waters, author of The Dean of Discipline and Caw
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