ABOUT THIS BOOK

Bird Skin Coat is brimming with startling moments of beauty found within a rusty and decayed landscape. With wild lyrical images of ascent and descent—doves and dives, sparrows and slugs, attics and cellars—this collection reflects Sorby’s keen eye for blending images. As they shuttle between the Upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, these poems explore how the radical instability of the world is also the source of its energy.

Honorable Mention, Posner Book-Length Poetry Award, Council for Wisconsin Writers

Winner, Best Book of Poetry, Midwest Book Awards

Winner, Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award, Council for Wisconsin Writers

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Angela Sorby is associate professor of English at Marquette University. She is author of two books, Distance Learning: Poems and Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry.

REVIEWS

“Angela Sorby says, ‘the camera’s holier than the human mind: see how it filters out the truth and leaves the beauty.’ But Sorby’s disposition as a poet is to keep the truth in the picture—the rude, uncoordinated, self-destructive truth—and the skids and barrel rolls of perspective she performs with her idiomatic lyricism always keep the poem alive. ‘Do the drivers deserve their down coats?’ is only one of many penetrating questions this self-employed private eye will ask in the course of her investigative storytelling.”—Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me

“Angela Sorby’s collection blends the comic and the tragic in entirely original ways. These poems gaze inward and outward and travel through the world with a keen eye and an unfailing ear for the miraculous music of ordinary language. She brings to each detail a luminous intensity, made that much more startling by its casual subjects—fender-benders, motherhood, the Midwest. Sorby’s is an important voice, speaking to the most important subjects without fear or pretense. Bird Skin Coat is full of striking imagery and compassionate skepticism—an exciting new contribution to American poetry.”—Laura Kasischke, author of Dance and Disappear

“The wise poems of a fire-walker.”—Marilyn Nelson

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part One
Bird Skin Coat
Breathing Out Smoke
Nostalgia for the Present
Rose
Whose Woods These Are
Neighborhood Watch
Small Talk
Middle Distance
Erin's Leather Jacket
Dragons of the Bible
Walking Directions
What Helen Caught
Catch and Release
Conversion Narrative
Mountain of Names
The Snow-Woman
The Diagnosis
Insomnia

Part Two
Kickflip
The Attic of the Attic
Prosperity
Flyover State
Taj Mahal
American Camel
Sky Falling on Cedars
Sleeping with Stars
Forest Floor
Sleeping in the Pioneer Rooms
Objects Made Real by Observation
Night Train to Whitefish
In the Good Pain Wing
Six Degrees of Separation
Transport to Sumer
Museum Study
First Lady of the War
Dove and Dove
The Urn

EXCERPT

The woman he hit is still 42. She notes with wonder how her parka fits her perfectly the way a dove’s skin holds the whole bird together. Fate is not a thing with feathers, it’s old, bald, and blind, a pope who can’t decipher the man’s name, David Pratt, as he scrawls it on scratch paper. —excerpt from “Bird Skin Coat” © The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.

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