Official Release Date November 9, 2022
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In this intimate chapbook of poems, Natalie Easton examines the complexity of her relationship with her mother through a kaleidoscope of loss, grief, and love. The troubles of childhood are reexamined in adulthood, brought out and looked at with a new depth of understanding. This is a book that encourages the reader to look harder at the difficult moments, and find the gems hidden there.
“I’ll Buy You a Bird Instead is a complex cry of longing – from a ‘throat veined white like a cut strawberry’ – for the ever-disappearing mother. These poems are painted in the many colors of illness, healing, resentment, surprising humor, regret: ‘Go in, I will my former self. / Just for a glass of water.’ From caring for the parent in extremis (‘If you weren’t conscious in an hour, / then I should make a call’) to tending her body after death (‘For all I knew you felt it still’), from denial (‘I have tried to escape without / burying you’) to acceptance (‘Now that I’m alone I know / you’ll never stop returning to me’), Easton brings a mother-daughter relationship – both foundational and impossible – into razor-edge focus, side-by-side with its loss. Easton’s eye is unflinching, her portrayal of grief unstinting. The red bird glowing behind these poems – the parrot itself and the mother’s devotion, even mixed with betrayal – is a reminder that love can wreck us and still we can be ‘filled – like an urn – with its beauty.’”
—Laura Cherry, author of Haunts (Cooper Dillon Books)
“If, as poet Marianne Boruch says, ‘A poem is a box, to put other things in—for safekeeping,’ then Easton’s debut collection, I’ll Buy You a Bird Instead is a series of nesting boxes, each more delicate than the last, each made to hold both the inscrutable pain of losing a mother and the vastness of her love, imperfect as that may be. ‘I don’t know which parts of the past / to throw away,’ says the daughter, mourning her mother’s slow fade into physical and mental illness. Yet these capacious, durable poems contain all that’s worth keeping: ‘your pinky tucked between our palms like a small animal / your long nail chafing…hard as a beak.’ With lyrical fluency, narrative precision, and imagery sharp as cut gems, Easton teaches us how to look, how not to look away, and how to find what matters. ‘Lodged like a wisdom tooth in [the] jaw,’ these fierce and tender poems affirm that at the end of pain, what remains is wisdom. What remains is love.
—Angela Narciso Torres, author of What Happens Is Neither