Bird Body

Author: Zoë Fay-Stindt

Publisher: Cordella Press (2022)

Bird Body offers powerful, complex, and incisive glimpses into the tensions that lie at the heart of survivorship. “Everyone wants you to stop writing / about it, this unkillable thing, enough, enough. / You have been loved, yes, / you are fortunate,” she writes, pushing back against demands that society makes of survivors: don’t speak, stay open, forgive, be grateful, move on. This forceful debut investigates virtue and shame, asking, “what use does good have / in this old world? And what shade of it are you // today?”