Birds of America

“How much I enjoyed Chera Hammons’s Birds of America. It’s gorgeous, witty, harrowing and moving!”—Ron Charles

“These poems move seamlessly between the wonder of the natural world and dissonance of our domestic lives. They ask that we hold them together and consider what each might teach us. I will be thinking about these poems for a long time.”—Clint Smith, author of Above Ground and How the Word Is Passed

“The poems sing like the titular animals and probe again and again at our own animal hearts. They ask questions that hurt and offer beauty, heartbreak, and balm.”—José Olivarez, author of Promises of Gold

“Hammons’s insight 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

“These poems ruffle, they linger, and at all costs, they remember the thorny trail that a woman must take to survive.”—Olivia Gatwood, author of Life of the Party

“These poems weave together natural history with family history, where drought, extinction, 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

“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

“In Birds of America, Chera Hammons explores with grace the small majesties and big complications of our exquisite, suffering planet. Holding fast to the beauty and the pain and the truth and the stories, Hammons enacts the great human challenge of holding hopelessness and hope together, and making something of both.”—Carrie Fountain, author of The Life