When Mockingbirds Sing by Katherine Nelson-Born

Katherine Nelson-Born’s poems are well-polished pearls, stories of abuse, illness, death, and gut-survival. Despite her imperfect childhood, Katherine Nelson-Born demonstrates her resilience celebrating life and hope as “Another blast of cold air rips off the heads of bright red bat-faced flowers. Grinning, they spin off over roof tops, break free of gravity, falling up.”

–Janice Evans, M.L.A.

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

Katherine Nelson-Born’s premiere poetry chapbook celebrates the imagination’s triumph over personal and global tragedies. When Mockingbirds Sing takes flight out of the ruins of Katrina and Palmyra and the ravages of poverty and disease, and “sets free from earth’s orbit” the ordinary and the extraordinary in words “so clean, so twisted” that we want to be a part of the poets’ rocket-ride of “cosmic debris/firing across the universe.”

 

In poems that “sing like the Mockingbird” from a “throaty darkness” illuminating a “new dark edged with sparks,” Katherine’s wordplay makes us “backwards/fly” and rise like “a snowy egret” into the sun, “wings ablaze,” exploding above the ruins we create and yet survive into something “newer than the morning of a day not yet born.” Katherine’s words “fall/like dogwood petals flowering the ashen earth” and dare us to ask ourselves if art is “worth a life.” Read her poems and “bear witness,” and if you “feel lost,” remember, “the fossils point the way.”

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

Katherine’s chapbook celebrates survival and the ability to create in an environment often hostile to both. Katherine’s poems reflect growing up poor in the South on the periphery of the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, and the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies.

 

In a country where 1 in 8 women is diagnosed with breast cancer and 1 in 5 sexually assaulted, as a survivor of both, Katherine writes poems that make music out of abuse, poetry out of poverty, and speak to the experiences shared by countless other American women.

Katherine’s artful wordplay brings to light from “throaty darkness” a “sisterhood reaching back” to “ancient stones/once used to weigh down girls,” and sings to us “of a time/older than the ruins of Pompeii,/newer than the morning of a day not yet born.”

Women of all ages will feel uplifted reading Katherine’s provocative visions of life for the female sex, precarious, “like a carton of eggs on the edge of a countertop,” the “bloodspot of a single egg” mapping the way back “to the Great Mother.”

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

 

Her new poetry chapbook is a powerful compilation of poems in which Katherine Nelson-Born bares her soul to the world.

 

Never one to mince her words, Katherine writes with brutal honesty and magnificent beauty.

 

This is a truly empowering collection of poems written for everywoman and everyman.

–Dana M. Taylor, M.A.T.

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

Katherine Nelson-Born’s premiere poetry chapbook has a bittersweet grounding in her New Orleans roots.

 

Seasoned with survival of abuse, poverty, hurricanes, breast cancer, and lost loved ones, Katherine’s provocative poems present an unflinching vision of life’s fragility.

 

Her artful wordplay brings to light from “throaty darkness” a “sisterhood reaching back” to “ancient stones/once used to weigh down girls” and sings to us “of a time/older than the ruins of Pompeii,/newer than the morning of a day not yet born.”

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

Humble beginnings in the New Orleans area provide the foundation for a lifetime of insight that Nelson-Born has transformed into art. Twenty-three powerful poems grace the pages to take the reader into a world of rich imagery, a roller coaster childhood, and a woman who survived and emerged with a wealth of experience to express.

 

Her book opens with the title poem and takes the obvious literary allusion to a new level. She pens words like the last line of her first poem “newer than the morning of a day not yet born.” Mostly Nelson-Born writes poetry of relationships: from sister and brother, mother and father to husband and daughter. Many poems are maternal expressions of the wonder of her daughter like “After Breakfast” and the amazement of “silver soap bubbles.” Others reflect on her own childhood that doesn’t come across as idyllic as she makes her daughter’s. If good writing is born of pain, Nelson-Born’s poetry bears witness to that adage.
Because of her journey, the reader will celebrate with her in every victory and every sensuous delight. This poetry is as imaginative as “the Blue Fairy chasing Monarch butterflies,” as sensual as “I drip like berry juice from your fingertips,” and as alive as “a thunderbolt split the sky.”

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

In “When Mockingbirds Sing,” Katherine Nelson-Born generously leads us on a journey through hurricanes, loss, abandonment, joy, love, death, and dogwood petals. While never shying away from ugliness and despair, these perfectly balanced poems cut through the darkness and bring us to a higher, illuminated ground, a place so many fail to ever see or believe in. This redemptive thread runs throughout the book as she, “a woman who loves the earth in her hands,” reclaims what is rightfully hers, “a garden in a world not condemned.” Her poems not only remind us that it’s “our garden” too, but bravely show us a “way back” with the fierce wisdom of a daughter, sister, and mother clearly aware of her matriarchal line and the power of her words, like “prayer beads you brush with your lips.” These words, like great music, never falter, but shine, sing us back to ourselves, and are proof that the “deadly world” is also still “beautiful.”

–Jamey Jones, Poet Laureate of Northwest Florida, West Florida Literary Federation

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

Katherine Nelson-Born writes with both compassion and strength in her brilliant new collection When Mockingbirds Sing.  Nelson-Born’s poems are rich in resolve as she tells of a life that only a survivor can tell: “Welfare warriors whisk us off time and time again / to shelters shared by other children / who taunt you for words you cannot speak, / me for words I throw freely with my fists as backup.”  This is a book to be shared with any person who has experienced abuse, poverty or illness.

~ Leah Maines, M. Div., award-winning and best-selling author