Birds and Bruises

In this striking and sensitively crafted pamphlet, Vanessa Napolitano ties her work together with ribbons of birds. Magpies, hummingbirds and winged things of origami throng these poems. They 'slice open the morning', and what spills out among recipes, dandelions and blossom trees is a blend of strength and softness, where 'edges are not precise.' Napolitano's sense of place is particularly strong, deftly lifting us from her kitchen and garden to the streets of Los Angeles and beyond. These are vivid, sensory poems of memory, motherhood and belonging that I will come back to again and again. I loved this collection!

-Jen Feroze

Vanessa Napolitano's Birds and Bruises is a subtle collection based in the everyday, but the poems work like little spells. There is a much to be said for the quiet poem when it teeters on a moment, like the delicate observations of a mother in 'This morning' as she folds laundry in the garden. How many of us lead lives of high drama after all? No, Napolitano's poetry finds profound truths in smallness, in the domestic, in cauliflowers and dandelions, in trifles, origami and banana currents. What deep currents, however, run through these unobtrusive voices and lives.

-Zoe Brigley, author of Hand & Skull, editor of Poetry Wales