Description
Wild Familiars – NWVS #188
by Linda Malm
Paper
979-8-89990-285-7
2025
“Wild Familiars” is a finalist in the 2024 Finishing Line Press chapbook competition. The collection embraces the nature of birds to convey observations on life and mortality. The tone is one of appreciation and acceptance, rather than fear. Ducks pair and glide: “O for such a shadowing”, dead birds are honored: “my feather cache”. Birds are held: “faint body heat through feathers”, released: “I fly”. Sometimes birds briefly inhabit a poem: “parting wing beats”, “reflections that wobble with a swallow swoop”. Sometimes birds fully dominate an incident or narrate a persona poem. The poems utilize a variety forms, word play and music. Wildness in birds and in ourselves is valued for its intensity.
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Linda Malm was published as a teen and only returned to poetry after she retired as a college dean. She won the competition to become a writer of Los Luceros (the Robert Redford/NM Film Board Enterprise) and more recently has been actively publishing both on-line and in print journals and anthologies. In 2023 Kelsay Books published her first chapbook, Winded from the Chase. Following the book launch, The Taos News reviewed it as “embracing wildness without fear.” It also noted “acute observations on mortality.” These explorations continue in “Wild Familiars” due for release in November, 2025 by Finishing Line Press. It was a finalist in their chapbook competition and is described in a blog by Sawnie Morris as musical, witty, and “the spirit of an elder woman- one who has arrived in beauty, alert to the gifts and complexities of the natural world… showing us the way”
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