Girl, Woman, Bird by Katherine Morgan

In Kay Morgan’s Girl, Woman, Bird, visual art serves as a mirror or a sliding glass door into another life. Whether it is plaster figurines, monuments, or the skins of extinct birds holding the ghosts of their hearts, these forms are not voiceless. Morgan’s poems elegize both the personal and national past, allowing the stains of history to speak through objects and reveries. Whatever catches our sight in this book, whether a portrait or a bird, lets us pause the hours and see the world revealing itself to us, explaining its silhouettes and its songs.

–Traci Brimhall, Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Kansas State University, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon)

Girl, Woman, Bird

Think of each of the words in the title of Girl, Woman, Bird as semi-transparent overlays, and think of this book as a composite portrait of the artist. Not only is a girlhood recollected in these poems, but there is also an adult finding her bearings in our troubled times. And there are birds, from robins and woodpeckers, to a sharp-shinned hawk. These literal birds point toward a free, exploratory, and singing spirit that informs Morgan’s poetry throughout, especially in her exquisitely well-crafted ekphrastic poems. This collection affirms and celebrates the spirit of art itself, and shows us how essential that spirit is to our lives, and to the meanings we make out of them.

–Fred Marchant, Emeritus Professor of English, Suffolk, University, Boston, MA, author of Said Not Said (Graywolf Press)

GIRL, WOMAN, BIRD opens with a prose poem that riffs on  notions of “home” and serves as a terse “bio note” that introduces the reader to poem after powerful poem.

Morgan considers issues of gender and race, war and death in ekphrastic poems that reference the haunting constructions of Titus Kaphar, a melancholy photograph by Sally Mann, strange and unsettling paintings by Ana Teresa Fernandez and Danielle Julian Norton, historic “lynching photography,” iconic work by Wyeth and Pratt. And should the reader choose to avail herself of the opportunity to go online to search out those works, she will be rewarded twice.

Other poems deconstruct family, friendship, longing, and our complicated relationship to the natural world. There is so much to ponder in these poems. With precise language and clear-eyed honesty, Kay Morgan has given us the gift of insight.

–Marie Harris, former NH Poet Laureate, author of Desire Lines (Hobblebush Press)