Life-List

Poetry. LIFE-LIST is a meditation on memory, love, and grief organized through the language of birding. From a fluttering first kiss to the frantic flapping of the last captive passenger pigeon on Earth looking for her mate, LIFE-LIST explores the relation of the individual to her incessantly disappearing habitat. "we have lost something in the translation / of time into language," Jessica Smith writes in this lovely book of experimental poems, LIFE-LIST. But breaking open the words, she enables "that which would kill you" to burst into flowers, creating the space--of breath, of spirit, of imagination--to let the birds in this book of birds fly through.--Ann Fisher-Wirth "Dinosaurs did not go extinct. Approximately 10,000 extant species of birds appear to be descended from a subgroup of theropods, a heritage that includes our childhood idol T Rex as well as the bee hummingbird. Birders know the richness of heeding their presence & variety, the divination of alectryomancy, the creation of LIFE- LISTs. Any reader who heeds the n apart from hero in heron will recognize how birds articulate space & vice versa, how a life looking outward can be invested with our deepest interiors. The Brain, a very smart woman once wrote, is wider than the sky."--Ron Silliman