Commodore Rookery by Christy Lee Barnes

With this collection, Barnes builds a story of her own uneasy nesting, longing for the skill and certainty of birds. From the opening dream of entrapment to her memory of a garage sale image by which she didn’t expect to be haunted, she captures the wanting and weight of human motherhood—but also its hope, and a trust that we can be helped to see differently, as if from a winged vantage. In these watchful poems, a spattering of rain or a spray of starlings can be a token of celebration; maternal struggle is also remade, into empathy for the tenderness of life and for the simple, basic need to settle and feel safe.

–Libby Maxey, editor at Literary Mama, and author of Kairos (Finishing Line Press 2019) and Indwelling (Resource Publications 2024)

With all the intensity, clarity, and distillation of Sylvia Plath, Christy Lee Barnes takes the reader on a journey of transformation, parenthood, and healing. In Commodore Rookery, the speaker instructs us, “Now flex a naked wrist, // which is healed, / which was never broken.” Balancing on the edge of language and feeling, Barnes is “speaking between species” and “learning to forget language, / to listen instead.” This is a collection that taught me how to “turn fear // into feathers. How to grow back a limb. / How to magic a circle.” Commodore Rookery is a resilient collection of poems, a “song of certainty for the day.” I will return to these poems by Christy Lee Barnes that celebrate “What trust it takes, / this life. /All of it.”

–Jennifer Martelli, editor at Mom Egg Review, and author of The Queen of Queens.

In poems that speak of letting go, accepting a softer body and sitting with emptiness, the speaker navigates a tumultuous journey into new motherhood in the shadow of a local heron rookery. Commodore Rookery celebrates motherhood but refuses to sugarcoat the ways it has challenged the speaker, the worry dust that cannot be cleaned, and what’s been lost, asking, “How do we know what we’ll go on to want?”

–Cindy Veach, editor at Mom Egg Review, author of Her Kind