“Birds of America is a pliant, wise clarion collection that draws on the natural world to offer testimony, witness, and, ultimately, healing. This is a birder’s guide to survival, with the poet as our binoculars—trained outward toward the sky and inward toward the most vulnerable chambers of the heart.”—Jennifer Givhan, author of Belly to the Brutal and Salt Bones
“How much I enjoyed Chera Hammons’s Birds of America. It’s gorgeous (also witty, harrowing and moving)!”—Ron Charles
“In Birds of America, Chera Hammons listens like an expert. She listens to birdsong and weather, to hunger, debt, illness, and inheritance, and to all the fragile bargains that let a life continue. Like a nest woven with some of your own hair, these poems intertwine natural history with family history, where drought, extinction, genetic chance, and economic precariousness mirror the risks carried by bodies, animal and human alike. Hammons excels at holding contradiction: wanting the storm and fearing it, loving what may be lost, knowing that care itself can also wound. She renders attention as a kind of labor, and hope as something earned rather than promised.”—Taylor Mali, author of The Whetting Stone
“These days, there’s a lot to think about. Some days, there’s too much. When time doesn’t fly, birds do. The medicinal lightness and brightness of birds—seeing birds, hearing birds—can set the world almost straight again. Chera Hammons’ insightful eye gives new voice to birds, striking just the right chord when a morning needs to get off on the right note, or an evening needs centering before slumber.”—Carl Safina, author of Alfie and Me
“Birds of America is an achievement. The poems sing like the titular animals and probe again and again at our own animal heart. They ask questions that hurt and offer beauty, heartbreak, and balm. This book reminds what poetry is capable of.”—José Olivarez, author of Promises of Gold and Citizen Illegal
