Bücher von Ann Fisher-Wirth

In this extraordinary collection, Ann Fisher-Wirth looks levelly at mortality, grief, and memory, and reckons with what it is to be urgently alive, bringing her incisive nuance to subjects ranging from the loss of a beloved sister to Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary to our imperiled natural world to the comforts of marital love. In "Wooden Comb," Fisher-Wirth writes, "I cannot reconcile how the world is sweet, how the world is burning." Paradise Is Jagged is too wise a book to promise impossible reconciliation. Instead it offers a benediction of sorts: Walk with me through this difficult and tender place, it says. Willingly, gratefully, we do. -Catherine Pierce, Danger Days, 2021-2025 Mississippi Poet Laureate

Like "sunlight stroking the birds' throats so it comes out as song," Ann Fisher-Wirth's graceful and sturdy lines unsettle the seemingly familiar. A writer of moral gravity, her distilled attentiveness presses against our all-too-common ambivalence and detachment from the ordinary world. Whether set in Mississippi, California, the Ozarks, or France, the poems in The Bones of Winter Birdsexhibit an abundance of compassion and civility. As Fisher-Wirth praises, laments, lets go, language salvages what might otherwise be missed. It's with attentiveness and emotional poise that these poems lay everything bare. Despite fear and everyday darkness, "I think we are provided for" she reminds us, a consolation for which I am grateful. This is a beautiful book. -Shara Lessley