We Are Hopelessly Small and Modern Birds

Poetry. Sara Lefsyk’s WE ARE HOPELESSLY SMALL AND MODERN BIRDS is a mysterious, magical, mind-disturbing collection of alternate universes (as in a series of novellas), and, at the same time, love songs to our crazy demented heart-breaking world (as in poems). Try to pin these pieces down–you can’t. Why would you want to? They’re revisionary and restless, eccentric and leapy, symmetrical and jarring, fun as hell and serious as a hot air balloon full of philosophers over the mountains of Kentucky. A delightful, original, riveting collection. Enjoy!–Maureen Seaton In Sara Lefsyk’s brilliant debut collection, WE ARE HOPELESSLY SMALL AND MODERN BIRDS, we encounter a small ward in a hospital the size of a universe, Heidigger, Kant, a small man who speaks in parables, numerous messiahs, hundreds of birds and animals, a strange doctor and his son, birds that need watering, and ‘pharmacological pancakes.’ Sara Lefsyk is a leaping poet, a poet whose ‘thought-life and flight-life are united with the associative powers of the unconscious’ (Robert Bly). Rooted in fairytale and parable, her poems fly from dream to dream, always waking in another dream–worlds inside worlds, the heaviest sea lighter than a feather. She writes: ‘Someone has to tear my body from its body’; ‘I had been killing the strange arms of my soul… but a man sat crying with small birds in his face’; ‘Finally, once again we can look and see that all the little golden lemons are hanging over our genius heads.’ Paradoxes leap from the songs in this book. So many astounding poems!–Jeff Friedman