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Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal
- GenresNonfiction
79 pages, Paperback
Published February 1, 2024
2 people are currently reading
4 people want to read
About the author
Sarah Rose Nordgren
7 books10 followersSarah Rose Nordgren is the author of Feathers: A Bird Hat Wearer’s Journal (Essay Press, 2024), which earned the Essay Press Book Prize, and the poetry collections Darwin’s Mother (University of Pittsburgh, 2017) and Best Bones (University of Pittsburgh, 2014), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Agni, and Narrative, and have been featured by PBS Newshour, The Slowdown podcast, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She lives in her hometown of Durham, North Carolina, and is currently at work on a craft book for climate and environmental writing called Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change, which is forthcoming from West Virginia University Press in 2027.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 30, 2025
Nordgren’s book is hard for me to describe. Maybe it’s writing that got caught in costume. Dressed as a period piece for a fashion magazine. Maybe it’s an occasional notebook for inscribing observations about fashion and hats decorated with birds’ feathers and stuffed corpses. Maybe it’s an extended monograph on the designer, Alexander McQueen, especially his intersection of violence, femininity, and birds. Categorically, it’s a hybrid book of contemporary prose lyrically playing at the contradiction underlying its subject matter, leaning heavily on juxtapositions between POV, literary non-fiction, and imagery. In fact, the availability of contradiction is the risk of the book. Wouldn’t it be easy to critique a fashion that killed thousands of birds just so women could raise their look to the fashion of the day? Hasn’t contemporary feminism revealed the contradictorily “natural” roles patriarchy projects onto women?
Nordgren’s graceful arrangement of subject, however, makes these critiques on contemporary culture feel like a muscular guide. Should the 19th Century fashion of pluming a woman’s hat with bird feathers cast women in a “natural” light? Should the fashion frame her as a possible conquest for the male gaze, as though he who would be “instinctively” drawn to master nature? Is the feathered hat just one of a long line of fashion choices, driving supply and demand cycles into what is now a familiar negligent profit-motive?
For me, what’s most striking about Sarah Rose Nordgren’s book is how swiftly she complicates the match between millinery and plumage. What else has drawn an association between women and birds? Yes, there’s how it might align women with nature. Or it’s the implication of human violence against nature, but whose violence? The women pursuing the most elaborate hat, or the men hunting for the materials necessary to make the hats? I appreciate the reach of Nordgren’s associations, extending beyond nature to include religious symbolism. The strange presence of a bird at the Annunciation. Is the bird a veiled sexual statement evoking statements about women? Is the bird the aggressor? Is the bird’s presence statement about conception? And, finally, in a capstone move, the controversial styles of Alexander McQueen. Like I can’t tell if Nordgren was animated by a fascination with what McQueen made, or if her research naturally led her to his work. But the McQueen essays make almost a perfect as conclusion to the book.
And part of that perfection is Nordgren’s investigation and indulgence of many unclarities. How observations on 19th Century fashion need to be unclear partly because they’re borne out of the 19th Century. And all we have in 2025 is an archive that might help piece together the diverging currents of thought. Essentially, there is no innocence accounting for a fashion that puts women together with birds. And, as time has borne out, iIt’s not only fashion and color coordination. There are so many complicated birds that might appear in women’s lives. While it might be argued that the book is about birds in women’s hats from the 19th Century, it’s how the book makes more of it, and the reason it needs to make that argument, that makes it so fascinating.
Nordgren’s graceful arrangement of subject, however, makes these critiques on contemporary culture feel like a muscular guide. Should the 19th Century fashion of pluming a woman’s hat with bird feathers cast women in a “natural” light? Should the fashion frame her as a possible conquest for the male gaze, as though he who would be “instinctively” drawn to master nature? Is the feathered hat just one of a long line of fashion choices, driving supply and demand cycles into what is now a familiar negligent profit-motive?
For me, what’s most striking about Sarah Rose Nordgren’s book is how swiftly she complicates the match between millinery and plumage. What else has drawn an association between women and birds? Yes, there’s how it might align women with nature. Or it’s the implication of human violence against nature, but whose violence? The women pursuing the most elaborate hat, or the men hunting for the materials necessary to make the hats? I appreciate the reach of Nordgren’s associations, extending beyond nature to include religious symbolism. The strange presence of a bird at the Annunciation. Is the bird a veiled sexual statement evoking statements about women? Is the bird the aggressor? Is the bird’s presence statement about conception? And, finally, in a capstone move, the controversial styles of Alexander McQueen. Like I can’t tell if Nordgren was animated by a fascination with what McQueen made, or if her research naturally led her to his work. But the McQueen essays make almost a perfect as conclusion to the book.
And part of that perfection is Nordgren’s investigation and indulgence of many unclarities. How observations on 19th Century fashion need to be unclear partly because they’re borne out of the 19th Century. And all we have in 2025 is an archive that might help piece together the diverging currents of thought. Essentially, there is no innocence accounting for a fashion that puts women together with birds. And, as time has borne out, iIt’s not only fashion and color coordination. There are so many complicated birds that might appear in women’s lives. While it might be argued that the book is about birds in women’s hats from the 19th Century, it’s how the book makes more of it, and the reason it needs to make that argument, that makes it so fascinating.
Displaying 1 of 1 review