by
Speaking through both the poet and the voices of a garden, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding is a collection of nature poems and conversations. Concluding with an essay on the author's process of exploring this garden, this book imagines the characters of the plants and animals as realized voices exploring language and grief.
irruptions
"The departure of the birds from their normal range is an eruption, but their arrival somewhere else is the reverse – an irruption, a bursting in." —Scott Weidensaul, Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds
long after i had grown and found myself
a mother of small child, when i lived my first
domestic life in another home, a November
owl landed on our back fence in rain
perhaps lost, its young compass skewed
the owl, irrupting in the way children
push through their parents’ bedroom door
as once on Christmas, the year our dad
remained upstairs recuperating
and we celebrated spiritual birth on the bed
where like birds we irrupted into existence
bursting in to the room where our lives began
