B/RDS

BEatrice Szymkowiak is a French-American writer and scholar. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017, and obtained a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2022. She is the author of RED ZONE (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a poetry chapbook, as well as the winner of the 2017 Omnidawn Single Poem Broadside Contest. Her work also has appeared in Terrain.org, Portland Review, OmniVerse, Southern Humanities Review, and many others.

Foreword Preface [We want to touch the sky...] B/RDS Along Shallow & Grassy Shores I Around the Heavens It Is Nothing but a Song Viscera Sunset Mingled in Ploughed Earth, Yields The Trembling Gnawings The Night Is Pitch-Dark but We / Re/sound How Far South It May Be The Latter Part of Autumn II American Co. The Winged Lovers A /complete History Fierce Sticks & Stakes / Once Hunger Spring Was the Thickness of a Dollar How Bodies with Wings Sans Doute l'Oiseau The Instant They Are Caught, They Are Wont to Mute Hem/locks III Confinement Notes Our Small Attachments. An Ache In the Interior Spring along the Ridge Wherever Sun Ends Humanity Fills /our Hearts Cleft The Higher Stones of Shrines. Oil Slick Becalmed IV Decree of Shyness The Natural History Society The Only Authentic Account A Prize! A Prize! A New American Fauna Exhibit Ma/rion/ette Migrations Di/splayed as Sinew As if Bewildered Identified Trace Specimen Papillae V Of Be/coming Blades of Grass Out of their Breasts / as if We almost Touched Each Other Notwithstanding A/part Tongues, a Discontinuity / Occurs As Blossoms Fade Whole. Our Ardent Song To the Water That Carries Them Gently CODA The Remembrance of Thousands Acknowledgements

"B/RDS is a spellbinding immersion into a disappeared world and brand-new language. Through attention to sound, image, syntax, and diction, Szymkowiak creates a new experience of poetry, of history, and of the natural world. A masterful conversation unfolds in these pages that stitches together past and present, human and non-human, loss and survival. B/RDS is a re-seeing, and a restoration. It is not 'grim auguries, neither convenient evil. Only four wings unstitched from the sky."-Kyce Bello, author of Refugia "In BEatrice Szymkowiak's stellar debut B/RDS, poems 'murmur through shattered glass' as they quiver, perch, breed, and 'hatch from blades of grass.' I'm in awe of this work, the way it sings and moves, freed from the cage of time and attempted erasure. A critical collection that reminds us that we 'cannot conceive a single wing / passing over a meadow towards the earth, / that trembles."-Sherwin Bitsui, author of Dissolve "With the human caused extinction of at least 469 known species of birds, Beatrice Szymkowiak's highly inventive B/RDS critiques the ecologically ruinous discourses of natural history with its nature/culture divide. With the understanding that J. J. Audubon killed and then contorted the birds he captured in paintings-'their so tender necks /...the sickle of sorrow'-Szymkowiak's lyrical erasure of his Birds of America reveals and ultimately dismantles what she calls "an archival cage," so birds might escape, their voices becoming emmeshed with our own: 'Who is what is who? Fe/male, dirt, b/rd, d/earth. You & I &, &, &. Us.' In Szymkowiak's hands, language is deconstructed and reinvented with such acute attention and care that every word, like another living being, transforms us, the collection serving a vision of interconnectedness that resists, at every turn, human exploitation of the rest of the natural world."-Brenda CArdenas, author of Trace and Boomerang"Where other poets often content themselves with imagining and describing catastrophe, in this collection apocalypse resounds at the level of language itself. There are skyscapes and there are nests, breathtakingly contingent conjunctions of softness and structure. This book will stay with you, will teach you to see flickering outlines in the shadows, to hear the echo of wingbeats in the desolate breezes."-Monica Youn, author of Blackacre "In this profound collection, BEatrice Szymkowiak has conjured lyric and erasure poems to cross the vast distance of extinction and re-animate the spectral birds archived in J. J. Audubon's iconic 19th century ornithological text, Birds of America. Read these poems aloud: you will hear the cage of silence slit open and the ardent voices of thousands upon thousands of winged throats will migrate from the horizon. And when they plunge towards you, the earth will tremble with song."-Craig Santos Perez