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
Official Release Date November 9, 2022
AVAILABLE NOW!
USD$11 plus shipping