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The Summer of Dead Birds
“An often-sweet, often-startling autobiographical novel-in-verse about going through a divorce and the death of a loved one—meditating on life’s big and small losses, and the ways the universe at once reminds us of and assuages those losses.” — O, The Oprah Magazine “A fierce, funny, agonized, cracked-open aria in homage to the presence and passing of fiercely loved things.” —Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts how does a person dislodge the scenes
that burn inside them like arsoned cars? Ali Liebegott is reeling from a fresh, painful divorce. She wallows in grief and overassigns meaning to everyday circumstance, clinging to an aging Dalmatian and obsessing over dead birds. Going through the motions of teaching and walking her dog, she eventually decides to hit the Ali and Rorschach at the Center of the World. This autobiographical novel-in-verse is a chronicle of mourning and survival, documenting depression and picking apart failed intimacy. But Ali Liebegott’s poetry is laced with compassion, for herself and the reader and the world, as she learns to balance the sting of death with the tender strangeness of life.
that burn inside them like arsoned cars? Ali Liebegott is reeling from a fresh, painful divorce. She wallows in grief and overassigns meaning to everyday circumstance, clinging to an aging Dalmatian and obsessing over dead birds. Going through the motions of teaching and walking her dog, she eventually decides to hit the Ali and Rorschach at the Center of the World. This autobiographical novel-in-verse is a chronicle of mourning and survival, documenting depression and picking apart failed intimacy. But Ali Liebegott’s poetry is laced with compassion, for herself and the reader and the world, as she learns to balance the sting of death with the tender strangeness of life.
104 pages, Paperback
First published March 12, 2019
9 people are currently reading
800 people want to read
About the author
Ali Liebegott
10 books79 followersAli Liebegott is a lesbian American author whose work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Her first book, The Beautifully Worthless, won the Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction. Liebegott is a recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the New York Foundation for Arts. She taught creative writing at UC San Diego and currently lives in San Francisco.Her debut novel entitled The IHOP Papers was published in early 2007 and was awarded a Lambda Literary award for Women's Fiction, a Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, and was a finalist for a Stonewall Prize. She has toured the U.S. extensively with Sister Spit's Ramblin' Road Show and is represented by The Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.
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August 7, 2019Listening to a podcast episode with Liebegott right now and she's just said "You know, I feel like people have a block against poetry, just like how I have a block against quinoa. Like if you serve me quinoa and I take a bite, I'm ok with it, but the thought of quinoa makes me want to die." ...So I guess I have to read her poetry now!
September 4, 2019
My essay for the Poetry Foundation:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/arti...
The writer Jean Rhys, a great miner of autobiographical ore, once said, “The things you remember have no form. When you write about them, you have to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. To give life shape—that is what a writer does. That is what is so difficult.”
In her genre-bending, autobiographical novel-in-verse, The Summer of Dead Birds (2019), Ali Liebegott gives a morass of difficult real-life losses—cancer, divorce, the impending death of a pet—a hybrid literary shape that feels surprising but apt. She organizes lightly fictionalized episodes from her own life into sharp, spare lyric poetry. In doing so, she reminds readers that genres aren’t always distinct and that the big four broadly identified by the publishing industry and creative writing classes—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama—are neither wholly isolated nor exhaustive in their description of the forms that literature can take.
Liebegott constructs her beginning, middle, and end from a series of linked, lineated, sequential vignettes assembled as artfully as a well-built building. In fact, she opens the book with an epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Pilgrimage (1918) that itself evokes the notion of built space: “Summer was like your house; you know where / each thing stood. Now you must go into your heart as onto / a vast plain. Now the immense loneliness begins.”
Liebegott, who lives in Los Angeles and writes for the Emmy-winning Amazon series Transparent, is the author of four books, including the Lambda Award–winning epic road poem The Beautifully Worthless (2005), the Lambda Award–winning novel The IHOP Papers (2006), and the novel Cha-Ching! (2013). The throughline of her work is a quirky, voice-driven approach to gender and sexuality. In The Summer of Dead Birds, her narrative stand-in shares traits that Liebegott herself possesses: she’s a writer and a teacher going to and from writing classes, as well as a lesbian and a consummate animal lover.
Barely 100 pages, The Summer of Dead Birds tells of a trifecta of grief and death set in California and its outlying deserts. First, Liebegott’s narrator chronicles her mother-in-law’s rapid and fatal deterioration from cancer: “if you want to see time move fast / watch a fifty-five-year-old woman / go from gardening to dead in two months.”
Next, she recounts the subsequent dissolution of the narrator’s marriage to her adored then-wife. When the narrator’s therapist warns “Few lesbian relationships survive the death of a mother” and the narrator declares, “I was so mad when she said that / We will, we will, I thought,” readers root for the couple but are not surprised when the first lines of the next vignette announce “after I left you I had nowhere to live / so I moved into my tiny writing studio.”
Finally, the narrator records the decline of Rorschach, her beloved dog, whose unusual name is spot on (get it?) because she’s a dalmatian. “Rorschach will be thirteen in a few weeks,” Liebegott writes, registering the obsessive, anxious thinking that this fact incites. “I want to ask every stranger in the street, / What’s the oldest dog you ever knew?”
Published by the Feminist Press, a nonprofit founded to amplify feminist voices, the book is animated by both feminist and queer concerns. Its very form questions the normative discourses and assumptions surrounding both subjects. In a conversation with fellow formal innovator Maggie Nelson for the Believer in 2012, Liebegott observed, “It’s weird. In a world where there’s so much evolution in other ways, there’s this stronghold in keeping this genre this genre, that genre that genre.” And in an interview with BOMB in 2013, Liebegott said, “For me, it’s really important that queer characters be authentic—that they're not some television version of lesbians.” The storytelling style of The Summer of Dead Birds feels crucial to Liebegott's aim of achieving what to her feels authentic. Its deliberately fluid orientation toward genre disrupts and blurs categories of gender as well.
Of course, writers have blurred formal boundaries for centuries, but what makes Liebegott’s approach fresh and thoughtful is that she’s self-aware enough to subvert stereotypes or presumptions that might otherwise hang like mist over her story. Covering The Summer of Dead Birds for the feminist Women’s Review of Books, critic Laurie Stone acknowledges the possible clichés inherent in a tale of downhearted, animal-loving lesbians and praises the manner in which Liebegott defies such clichés :
The press release […] describes it as “a chronicle of mourning and survival, a vulnerable and honest document of depression and failed intimacy.” Would you read that? The press release imagines you are a sad lesbian, full of yearning for all the loves you have lost and loves you have yet to lose, plus dogs who will die on your couch. And it imagines you want your sadness to amount to something like wisdom, acceptance, or meaning, along with pet hair and lint. If you are this person, The Summer of Dead Birds is not for you. Read something else.
The press release’s formulas and pigeonholing aside, the shape of Liebegott’s book—84 linked lyric poems—and her confidential yet conversational, funny-sad voice upends expectations of a traditional memoir that follows a familiar arc of sorrow and redemption. The result makes for a far more idiosyncratic book. Both the lineated poems and the acknowledgment that this book is based on true events (that have been fictionalized) call attention to the constructed makeup of Liebegott’s story.
Queer writers in particular have taken delight in crossing and re-crossing the borders of genre, especially as those boundaries seek to demarcate truth from fiction. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Gertrude Stein’s gamesome version of her own autobiography, springs to mind, as does Toklas’s The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954), which really does contain intriguing recipes (including a notorious one for hashish fudge) mixed with the author’s memoiristic accounts of her adventures with Stein in France, Spain, and the United States.
One also thinks of the poet and novelist Kevin Killian, whose two memoirs—Bedrooms Have Windows (1989) and its previously unpublished sequel, Bachelors Get Lonely—were released late last year, along with a new prose piece, Triangles in the Sand, under the title Fascination: Memoirs. Despite its being called memoirs, Killian included sections of Bachelors in two subsequent fiction collections. These texts are about a writer also named Kevin Killian and are examples of the meta-/self-reflexive approach he pioneered beginning in the late 1970s as one of the founding members of the New Narrative movement. Along with Dodie Bellamy, Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, Dennis Cooper, and others, Killian and his New Narrative cohort sought to depict subjective experience while pointing out that no text can be totally objective, and they encouraged skepticism of linear, coherent narratives.
In “Long Note on New Narrative,” Glück writes that this mode arose partly in response to the question “How to represent my experience as a gay man?” as well as “How can I convey urgent social meanings while opening or subverting the possibilities of meaning itself? That question has deviled and vexed Bay Area writing for twenty-five years. What kind of representation least deforms its subject?”
Without the heavy citation of theory that characterizes much New Narrative, Liebegott—herself a Bay Area/West Coast writer—is, as Glück wrote of New Narrative, “serious about wanting to bring emotion and subject matter into the field of innovative writing.” She works territory similar to, and in a similar fashion to, that of both Eileen Myles and Michelle Tea. Liebegott’s work also recalls that of the aforementioned Nelson, who describes Liebegott’s book as “a fierce, funny, agonized, cracked-open aria in homage to the presence and passing of fiercely loved things.” In The Argonauts (2015), Nelson crafted her own remarkable pastiche of discrete but interconnected prose blocks, an “authotheory” method that leaps from intimate descriptions of her relationship with her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, to citations from an array of fellow thinkers, including Roland Barthes, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Donald Winnicott. Like her queer, hybrid forerunners and contemporaries, Liebegott pursues a mode of storytelling that achieves a cohesive emotional truth while calling attention to that truth as a personally experienced, yet artificially built, thing.
In each strand of her story, Liebegott, the writer/narrator, mixes the causality, temporality, and suspense of narrative prose with the idea- and emotion-driven sparseness and linguistic play of lyric poetry. At the risk of stating the obvious, this aspect of her genre-blending—real-life sadness and melancholic reflectiveness expressed in poems that rarely exceed a page—keeps the atmosphere from growing too heavy. Because lyric poetry tends to be shorter than memoiristic prose, this epigrammatic form allows Liebegott to yield a compact, entertaining result.
As is fitting for a book with birds in the title, the collection starts with imaginative yet precise descriptions of avian behavior. As the narrator fills her birdbath, “a bird the size of a dust ball tried to fly / never getting higher than an inch off the lawn” while “a dove sat on a nearby branch / flapping its wings slowly and sadly / the way you numbly open and close a cabinet door / when there’s nothing inside to eat // finally, the dust ball gave up / fluttered inside a cinder block to hide.” The sick and doomed dust ball bird becomes a kind of objective correlative that sets the tone for the rest of the book, establishing a narrator who—self-aware in regard to how unrealistic her desire is—wants to rescue not only that creature but also every other broken or dying organism, even as the voice of one of her students, “the woman who raised canaries,” echoes in her head: “You can’t save everyone.”
Liebegott’s ample use of white space and section breaks gives her juxtaposition of personal grief with environmental and social grief room to breathe. She trusts readers to bridge the gaps and keep up with implied connections. Of the rash of smashed birds she sees in the section “Crying Season,” presumably killed by the walls and windows of the human city, she writes “it’s impossible not to think apocalypse / when the ground is covered in dead birds,” adding “there were so many I wondered if I should / take one to prove they were real.” Although she doesn’t mention in that vignette the divorce from her partner or the death of her mother-in-law or even Rorschach’s slow decline, readers understand the grim implications of the anecdote. The fissures between the fragments evoke the interpersonal and ecological breakdowns that the narrator herself struggles to live through.
She picks up this motif again in the following section, which begins “it’s the end of May and the sky is filled / with birds being little whores,” adding “this is the kind of courtship I understand / one lover throwing themself in front of a car / every four seconds in order to seduce the other.” A few pages later, she repeats the image, saying to her ex, “remember when we were little whores / weeks into our love affair on women’s land?” but notes that even in the ecstasy of “fucking like nobody’s business,” she couldn’t stop thinking of the damage that humans do to each other and to the planet: “I crawled around a field with my sketchbook / trying to capture the poses of a hundred dying bees” suffering from colony collapse.
Lest the book sound unrelentingly morose, it’s worth noting that Liebegott also performs standup around Los Angeles, both as herself and in the persona of her dog, Flaca; she even sometimes sports a mascot-esque dog suit. This facility with eccentric comedy is evident throughout The Summer of Dead Birds as she wisely blends humor into the sadness. Liebegott possesses an unerring eye for absurd personal detail, as when the narrator and her then-wife debate what to call an “impulse pet-shop buy” bird. The narrator wants “to name the bird Nabokov / but you didn’t want to commemorate a pedophile” and so “the only name we could agree on was Angel.” When that same bird dies after the couple break up, the narrator “froze her, cried hysterically, / and asked my therapist if I should have an autopsy done.”
Many of the vignettes would lend themselves to performance as standup monologues. They frequently open with the kind of incisive, throat-clearing declaration that sets a comedian up to deliver a riff. One begins, “I’d stop looking for dead things / if there’d stop being dead things everywhere”; another starts, “you think a dog is old until it gets even older.” The pieces often conclude with the acutely observed, contrarian, not-quite punchline that such riffs might reach, as when, recalling Rorschach’s puppyhood, Liebegott writes, “everyone said, / Don’t let the dog sleep in the bed with you / you’ll never be able to discipline the dog after that / but the whole point of having a dog / is to let it sleep in the bed.”
Liebegott’s genre versatility hops across media in that she is also a visual artist who often works with deadpan whimsy in oil on found wood. Some of her work incorporates such wry text as CONGRATULATIONS ON BEING A BIG DYKE and THE LESBIAN AVENGERS: WE RECRUIT and KEEP ABORTION LEGAL. The cover of Dead Birds features original art by Liebegott: a gouache on paper which depicts cacti out the window, a backpack by the door, and a spotted dalmatian resting atop a colorfully dotted bedspread. This image recapitulates and emphasizes the narrator’s explanation that “everything is spotted on a Dalmatian / not just the fur // the roof of the mouth, the inside of the lips and ears.”
The cover image—naïve, rough-edged, deliberately amateurish—reflects the simplicity and almost comically childlike nature of some emotions in the book: after the narrator's wife's mother finally dies, the narrator says, “you took the pillow that propped her head up / plump, like a pillow in a coloring book / big down marshmallow with a goose-head tag // and walked around the house / trying to pull the scent from its depths.” Both Liebegott’s visual art and her verbal portraits of grief can share a darkly cute quality: she writes, “after a divorce, does everyone float like a lost balloon? / their head a forest of rotting animals.” Significantly, Liebegott’s narrator identifies as a visual artist as well, saying to her soon-to-be-ex-wife, “our apartment was big and cheap / we both had a bedroom to hide in // in mine, I began a portrait of myself / pushing an oil pastel hard into the closet mirror / outlining my sunken eyes and worried brow.”
[see the rest online...]
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/arti...
The writer Jean Rhys, a great miner of autobiographical ore, once said, “The things you remember have no form. When you write about them, you have to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. To give life shape—that is what a writer does. That is what is so difficult.”
In her genre-bending, autobiographical novel-in-verse, The Summer of Dead Birds (2019), Ali Liebegott gives a morass of difficult real-life losses—cancer, divorce, the impending death of a pet—a hybrid literary shape that feels surprising but apt. She organizes lightly fictionalized episodes from her own life into sharp, spare lyric poetry. In doing so, she reminds readers that genres aren’t always distinct and that the big four broadly identified by the publishing industry and creative writing classes—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama—are neither wholly isolated nor exhaustive in their description of the forms that literature can take.
Liebegott constructs her beginning, middle, and end from a series of linked, lineated, sequential vignettes assembled as artfully as a well-built building. In fact, she opens the book with an epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Pilgrimage (1918) that itself evokes the notion of built space: “Summer was like your house; you know where / each thing stood. Now you must go into your heart as onto / a vast plain. Now the immense loneliness begins.”
Liebegott, who lives in Los Angeles and writes for the Emmy-winning Amazon series Transparent, is the author of four books, including the Lambda Award–winning epic road poem The Beautifully Worthless (2005), the Lambda Award–winning novel The IHOP Papers (2006), and the novel Cha-Ching! (2013). The throughline of her work is a quirky, voice-driven approach to gender and sexuality. In The Summer of Dead Birds, her narrative stand-in shares traits that Liebegott herself possesses: she’s a writer and a teacher going to and from writing classes, as well as a lesbian and a consummate animal lover.
Barely 100 pages, The Summer of Dead Birds tells of a trifecta of grief and death set in California and its outlying deserts. First, Liebegott’s narrator chronicles her mother-in-law’s rapid and fatal deterioration from cancer: “if you want to see time move fast / watch a fifty-five-year-old woman / go from gardening to dead in two months.”
Next, she recounts the subsequent dissolution of the narrator’s marriage to her adored then-wife. When the narrator’s therapist warns “Few lesbian relationships survive the death of a mother” and the narrator declares, “I was so mad when she said that / We will, we will, I thought,” readers root for the couple but are not surprised when the first lines of the next vignette announce “after I left you I had nowhere to live / so I moved into my tiny writing studio.”
Finally, the narrator records the decline of Rorschach, her beloved dog, whose unusual name is spot on (get it?) because she’s a dalmatian. “Rorschach will be thirteen in a few weeks,” Liebegott writes, registering the obsessive, anxious thinking that this fact incites. “I want to ask every stranger in the street, / What’s the oldest dog you ever knew?”
Published by the Feminist Press, a nonprofit founded to amplify feminist voices, the book is animated by both feminist and queer concerns. Its very form questions the normative discourses and assumptions surrounding both subjects. In a conversation with fellow formal innovator Maggie Nelson for the Believer in 2012, Liebegott observed, “It’s weird. In a world where there’s so much evolution in other ways, there’s this stronghold in keeping this genre this genre, that genre that genre.” And in an interview with BOMB in 2013, Liebegott said, “For me, it’s really important that queer characters be authentic—that they're not some television version of lesbians.” The storytelling style of The Summer of Dead Birds feels crucial to Liebegott's aim of achieving what to her feels authentic. Its deliberately fluid orientation toward genre disrupts and blurs categories of gender as well.
Of course, writers have blurred formal boundaries for centuries, but what makes Liebegott’s approach fresh and thoughtful is that she’s self-aware enough to subvert stereotypes or presumptions that might otherwise hang like mist over her story. Covering The Summer of Dead Birds for the feminist Women’s Review of Books, critic Laurie Stone acknowledges the possible clichés inherent in a tale of downhearted, animal-loving lesbians and praises the manner in which Liebegott defies such clichés :
The press release […] describes it as “a chronicle of mourning and survival, a vulnerable and honest document of depression and failed intimacy.” Would you read that? The press release imagines you are a sad lesbian, full of yearning for all the loves you have lost and loves you have yet to lose, plus dogs who will die on your couch. And it imagines you want your sadness to amount to something like wisdom, acceptance, or meaning, along with pet hair and lint. If you are this person, The Summer of Dead Birds is not for you. Read something else.
The press release’s formulas and pigeonholing aside, the shape of Liebegott’s book—84 linked lyric poems—and her confidential yet conversational, funny-sad voice upends expectations of a traditional memoir that follows a familiar arc of sorrow and redemption. The result makes for a far more idiosyncratic book. Both the lineated poems and the acknowledgment that this book is based on true events (that have been fictionalized) call attention to the constructed makeup of Liebegott’s story.
Queer writers in particular have taken delight in crossing and re-crossing the borders of genre, especially as those boundaries seek to demarcate truth from fiction. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Gertrude Stein’s gamesome version of her own autobiography, springs to mind, as does Toklas’s The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954), which really does contain intriguing recipes (including a notorious one for hashish fudge) mixed with the author’s memoiristic accounts of her adventures with Stein in France, Spain, and the United States.
One also thinks of the poet and novelist Kevin Killian, whose two memoirs—Bedrooms Have Windows (1989) and its previously unpublished sequel, Bachelors Get Lonely—were released late last year, along with a new prose piece, Triangles in the Sand, under the title Fascination: Memoirs. Despite its being called memoirs, Killian included sections of Bachelors in two subsequent fiction collections. These texts are about a writer also named Kevin Killian and are examples of the meta-/self-reflexive approach he pioneered beginning in the late 1970s as one of the founding members of the New Narrative movement. Along with Dodie Bellamy, Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, Dennis Cooper, and others, Killian and his New Narrative cohort sought to depict subjective experience while pointing out that no text can be totally objective, and they encouraged skepticism of linear, coherent narratives.
In “Long Note on New Narrative,” Glück writes that this mode arose partly in response to the question “How to represent my experience as a gay man?” as well as “How can I convey urgent social meanings while opening or subverting the possibilities of meaning itself? That question has deviled and vexed Bay Area writing for twenty-five years. What kind of representation least deforms its subject?”
Without the heavy citation of theory that characterizes much New Narrative, Liebegott—herself a Bay Area/West Coast writer—is, as Glück wrote of New Narrative, “serious about wanting to bring emotion and subject matter into the field of innovative writing.” She works territory similar to, and in a similar fashion to, that of both Eileen Myles and Michelle Tea. Liebegott’s work also recalls that of the aforementioned Nelson, who describes Liebegott’s book as “a fierce, funny, agonized, cracked-open aria in homage to the presence and passing of fiercely loved things.” In The Argonauts (2015), Nelson crafted her own remarkable pastiche of discrete but interconnected prose blocks, an “authotheory” method that leaps from intimate descriptions of her relationship with her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, to citations from an array of fellow thinkers, including Roland Barthes, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Donald Winnicott. Like her queer, hybrid forerunners and contemporaries, Liebegott pursues a mode of storytelling that achieves a cohesive emotional truth while calling attention to that truth as a personally experienced, yet artificially built, thing.
In each strand of her story, Liebegott, the writer/narrator, mixes the causality, temporality, and suspense of narrative prose with the idea- and emotion-driven sparseness and linguistic play of lyric poetry. At the risk of stating the obvious, this aspect of her genre-blending—real-life sadness and melancholic reflectiveness expressed in poems that rarely exceed a page—keeps the atmosphere from growing too heavy. Because lyric poetry tends to be shorter than memoiristic prose, this epigrammatic form allows Liebegott to yield a compact, entertaining result.
As is fitting for a book with birds in the title, the collection starts with imaginative yet precise descriptions of avian behavior. As the narrator fills her birdbath, “a bird the size of a dust ball tried to fly / never getting higher than an inch off the lawn” while “a dove sat on a nearby branch / flapping its wings slowly and sadly / the way you numbly open and close a cabinet door / when there’s nothing inside to eat // finally, the dust ball gave up / fluttered inside a cinder block to hide.” The sick and doomed dust ball bird becomes a kind of objective correlative that sets the tone for the rest of the book, establishing a narrator who—self-aware in regard to how unrealistic her desire is—wants to rescue not only that creature but also every other broken or dying organism, even as the voice of one of her students, “the woman who raised canaries,” echoes in her head: “You can’t save everyone.”
Liebegott’s ample use of white space and section breaks gives her juxtaposition of personal grief with environmental and social grief room to breathe. She trusts readers to bridge the gaps and keep up with implied connections. Of the rash of smashed birds she sees in the section “Crying Season,” presumably killed by the walls and windows of the human city, she writes “it’s impossible not to think apocalypse / when the ground is covered in dead birds,” adding “there were so many I wondered if I should / take one to prove they were real.” Although she doesn’t mention in that vignette the divorce from her partner or the death of her mother-in-law or even Rorschach’s slow decline, readers understand the grim implications of the anecdote. The fissures between the fragments evoke the interpersonal and ecological breakdowns that the narrator herself struggles to live through.
She picks up this motif again in the following section, which begins “it’s the end of May and the sky is filled / with birds being little whores,” adding “this is the kind of courtship I understand / one lover throwing themself in front of a car / every four seconds in order to seduce the other.” A few pages later, she repeats the image, saying to her ex, “remember when we were little whores / weeks into our love affair on women’s land?” but notes that even in the ecstasy of “fucking like nobody’s business,” she couldn’t stop thinking of the damage that humans do to each other and to the planet: “I crawled around a field with my sketchbook / trying to capture the poses of a hundred dying bees” suffering from colony collapse.
Lest the book sound unrelentingly morose, it’s worth noting that Liebegott also performs standup around Los Angeles, both as herself and in the persona of her dog, Flaca; she even sometimes sports a mascot-esque dog suit. This facility with eccentric comedy is evident throughout The Summer of Dead Birds as she wisely blends humor into the sadness. Liebegott possesses an unerring eye for absurd personal detail, as when the narrator and her then-wife debate what to call an “impulse pet-shop buy” bird. The narrator wants “to name the bird Nabokov / but you didn’t want to commemorate a pedophile” and so “the only name we could agree on was Angel.” When that same bird dies after the couple break up, the narrator “froze her, cried hysterically, / and asked my therapist if I should have an autopsy done.”
Many of the vignettes would lend themselves to performance as standup monologues. They frequently open with the kind of incisive, throat-clearing declaration that sets a comedian up to deliver a riff. One begins, “I’d stop looking for dead things / if there’d stop being dead things everywhere”; another starts, “you think a dog is old until it gets even older.” The pieces often conclude with the acutely observed, contrarian, not-quite punchline that such riffs might reach, as when, recalling Rorschach’s puppyhood, Liebegott writes, “everyone said, / Don’t let the dog sleep in the bed with you / you’ll never be able to discipline the dog after that / but the whole point of having a dog / is to let it sleep in the bed.”
Liebegott’s genre versatility hops across media in that she is also a visual artist who often works with deadpan whimsy in oil on found wood. Some of her work incorporates such wry text as CONGRATULATIONS ON BEING A BIG DYKE and THE LESBIAN AVENGERS: WE RECRUIT and KEEP ABORTION LEGAL. The cover of Dead Birds features original art by Liebegott: a gouache on paper which depicts cacti out the window, a backpack by the door, and a spotted dalmatian resting atop a colorfully dotted bedspread. This image recapitulates and emphasizes the narrator’s explanation that “everything is spotted on a Dalmatian / not just the fur // the roof of the mouth, the inside of the lips and ears.”
The cover image—naïve, rough-edged, deliberately amateurish—reflects the simplicity and almost comically childlike nature of some emotions in the book: after the narrator's wife's mother finally dies, the narrator says, “you took the pillow that propped her head up / plump, like a pillow in a coloring book / big down marshmallow with a goose-head tag // and walked around the house / trying to pull the scent from its depths.” Both Liebegott’s visual art and her verbal portraits of grief can share a darkly cute quality: she writes, “after a divorce, does everyone float like a lost balloon? / their head a forest of rotting animals.” Significantly, Liebegott’s narrator identifies as a visual artist as well, saying to her soon-to-be-ex-wife, “our apartment was big and cheap / we both had a bedroom to hide in // in mine, I began a portrait of myself / pushing an oil pastel hard into the closet mirror / outlining my sunken eyes and worried brow.”
[see the rest online...]
December 20, 2019
Beautifully unpretentious poetry about grief and imminent loss.
June 10, 2021
الحزن لغتي
March 8, 2022
My favorite type of poetry--straightforward, specific, visual, and tactile--about overlapping losses and griefs. A partner's mothers's death; a divorce; the impending death of a beloved, aging dog: topics that could be saccharine or bogged down by sentimentality, but Liebegott keeps her writing sharp and painful. Great stuff.
December 28, 2021
this was good but I felt like sometimes it leaned too heavily on overused cliches which threw me off kilter a bit. definitely some powerful and good writing but in other places felt too much like Tumblr poetry.
June 1, 2022
If you want to feel the wave of grief by living inside someone's heartbreak this is the book of narrative poems for you. The gorgeous sentiment on these pages root the author in post-divorce reality seeking meaning in dead birds and the aging dog companion accompanying her though the breakup. As a writer and painter (book cover is painted by Liebegott) the book provides a balm in that we all face heartbreak and losses, Liebegott's are just so fucking close to the surface.
July 21, 2021
this is the kind of poetry i like - straightforward, easy to follow, emotional and raw. ali liebegott tells us about her summer of dead birds, and the deaths of her mother-in-law, her marriage, and inevitably, her dog rorschach.
June 10, 2024
beautiful glimpse into the over assigning of meaning in everyday life when one experiences great loss
March 20, 2020
i sobbed while reading this. i can’t tell you the last time i sobbed reading a book. these poems singed my poor little heart and it was a pleasure to hurt like that. beautiful.
August 19, 2022
I wasn’t supposed to cry until fall
June 17, 2021
Do you ever judge a book by its cover?
To be honest, I’m not a fan of this book cover. That’s why I was very skeptical about reading it and probably wouldn’t have if it wasn’t required for my summer class.
However, the poems SURPRISED me. They were easy to understand and follow. There are a few different animals present throughout the poems and not just birds, but overall, the poems tie together to tell a story about a lesbian couple who were faced with the death of a mother and eventually struggled to stay married. The poems are split into four sections, and there are many gems in each. I’m sure you’ll find a favorite. I know I did—hint, it’s on page eighty-one!
If you like poem books that tell a story, this is one for your to-be-read list!
Four stars!
To be honest, I’m not a fan of this book cover. That’s why I was very skeptical about reading it and probably wouldn’t have if it wasn’t required for my summer class.
However, the poems SURPRISED me. They were easy to understand and follow. There are a few different animals present throughout the poems and not just birds, but overall, the poems tie together to tell a story about a lesbian couple who were faced with the death of a mother and eventually struggled to stay married. The poems are split into four sections, and there are many gems in each. I’m sure you’ll find a favorite. I know I did—hint, it’s on page eighty-one!
If you like poem books that tell a story, this is one for your to-be-read list!
Four stars!
January 20, 2019
A very easy, quick read that you will not want to put down. Beautifully written to the point of tears...numerous times. Planning on buying more copies for future gifts. My first five star review of 2019. Thank you Ali Liebegott.
March 20, 2019
Beautiful & heartbreaking. Need to read more of her work.
April 1, 2019
All my reviews can be seen at https://deedireads.com/.
I impulse-purchased this book after seeing it on Feminist Press’ Instagram channel. I’ve never disliked anything they published, and it looked beautiful, so I bought it. A+ DECISION, DEEDI. The Summer of Dead Birds was a heartbreakingly beautiful story told in poems that I will surely lend to many people and read several times over.
Ali Liebegott hits the nail on the head with this collection’s themes of grief, loss, fear, and love. Each poem is the type that you get halfway through reading and want to start over again, because you know that you need to savor the words and meaning more, but you can’t stop halfway because you’re so drawn in, and so you finish it and then read it again. And maybe a third time for good measure.
At only about 100 pages, the collection is short and will probably take you about an hour to read. Be prepared for that to be an emotional hour, in the best way. I read it on my commute, the first half in the morning and the second half in the evening. But by the time I got to work, I was emotional and sad and wanted to stay that way for a little while. So when I do it all again, I’ll make sure I’m on my couch with a blanket and a cup of coffee or glass of wine (depending on the time of day), and I’ll read it straight through.
Give yourself the gift of this collection. You won’t regret it.
I impulse-purchased this book after seeing it on Feminist Press’ Instagram channel. I’ve never disliked anything they published, and it looked beautiful, so I bought it. A+ DECISION, DEEDI. The Summer of Dead Birds was a heartbreakingly beautiful story told in poems that I will surely lend to many people and read several times over.
Ali Liebegott hits the nail on the head with this collection’s themes of grief, loss, fear, and love. Each poem is the type that you get halfway through reading and want to start over again, because you know that you need to savor the words and meaning more, but you can’t stop halfway because you’re so drawn in, and so you finish it and then read it again. And maybe a third time for good measure.
At only about 100 pages, the collection is short and will probably take you about an hour to read. Be prepared for that to be an emotional hour, in the best way. I read it on my commute, the first half in the morning and the second half in the evening. But by the time I got to work, I was emotional and sad and wanted to stay that way for a little while. So when I do it all again, I’ll make sure I’m on my couch with a blanket and a cup of coffee or glass of wine (depending on the time of day), and I’ll read it straight through.
Give yourself the gift of this collection. You won’t regret it.
April 22, 2019
I was lucky enough to hear Ali read at Booksoup in Weho, and I can't recommend trying to catch her in person enough! Not only is she a devastating writer (I mean like it felt like my heart was being slowly separated from my check with a thousand tiny nails) but she's incredibly funny in a way you'd never guess from this beautiful memoir-in-poems collection.
Some of my favorite lines, as a teaser for you:
"I've become a walking urn of my own ashes/
it doesn't matter, worthy or unworthy depression/
the ashes gather at the same winter rate"
"this is the kind of courtship I understand/
one lover throwing themself in front of a car/
every four seconds in order to seduce the other"
Some of my favorite lines, as a teaser for you:
"I've become a walking urn of my own ashes/
it doesn't matter, worthy or unworthy depression/
the ashes gather at the same winter rate"
"this is the kind of courtship I understand/
one lover throwing themself in front of a car/
every four seconds in order to seduce the other"
January 29, 2024
A collection of long poems broken into four sections telling of the poet's death of her MIL, the subsequent breakup of her marriage, and the love of her aging dog.
from Winter, V.: "I'd been afraid of Angel dying since day one / but that meant nothing since I'm afraid / of everything dying all the time // the first thing I do when I come in the door / is check that the pets are alive"
from Crying Season, XVI: "to live with a dog is to grow old with a dog // this is how you lean over to help your blind dog down / the steps / / this is how you lift your arthritic dog onto the bed // this is how you greet the deaf dog after work // look for her in every room until you find her asleep / then stand panicked in front of her until her chest moves"
from Winter, V.: "I'd been afraid of Angel dying since day one / but that meant nothing since I'm afraid / of everything dying all the time // the first thing I do when I come in the door / is check that the pets are alive"
from Crying Season, XVI: "to live with a dog is to grow old with a dog // this is how you lean over to help your blind dog down / the steps / / this is how you lift your arthritic dog onto the bed // this is how you greet the deaf dog after work // look for her in every room until you find her asleep / then stand panicked in front of her until her chest moves"
January 17, 2022
emotional reflective sad medium-paced
3.75
I like to think that I have a mature way of dealing with grief — that is until it hits and I want nothing more than to be a child, innocent and ignorant to the pains of the world. The author's writing style combines both those feelings, I feel, the straightforwardness of adulthood towards the turbulent current of loss. While I do prefer more flowery prose, this was a necessary read in order to get my head out of it and face grief in all of its hollowness. A particular quote that struck me was this:
3.75
I like to think that I have a mature way of dealing with grief — that is until it hits and I want nothing more than to be a child, innocent and ignorant to the pains of the world. The author's writing style combines both those feelings, I feel, the straightforwardness of adulthood towards the turbulent current of loss. While I do prefer more flowery prose, this was a necessary read in order to get my head out of it and face grief in all of its hollowness. A particular quote that struck me was this:
how does a person dislodge the scenes
that burn inside them like arsoned cars?
February 8, 2020
Every book in its own way raises questions about how you rate a piece of text. In the case of this one, the test lies in its form and how its used, which is not very well at all. The story doesn't matter, grief is all about how and this novel-in-verse had some quiant observations and thoughts but probed nothing deeper, gave no revelations. Many of the poems (is that what they're called?) end with mediocre and run-off-the-mill lines that think they're very much profound but are just Insta-poetry. Read if you like insta-poetry.
August 13, 2025
what a book to read in a summer of mourning things that are still alive
brewing a poem for my childhood dog as i write this
“when she’s gone i can only imagine it as the sadness of wanting a tangible god”
“in my absence i still want to protect you”
“made giant loops around the neighborhood from morning until night trying to know how to live next” : feels like this summer
“have you ever been lost like this, hours spent facedown unable to understand how you ended up with your heavy limbs or the tattoos that cover them”
brewing a poem for my childhood dog as i write this
“when she’s gone i can only imagine it as the sadness of wanting a tangible god”
“in my absence i still want to protect you”
“made giant loops around the neighborhood from morning until night trying to know how to live next” : feels like this summer
“have you ever been lost like this, hours spent facedown unable to understand how you ended up with your heavy limbs or the tattoos that cover them”
May 5, 2019
This is a beautiful and sad and hard book. I am a sucker for queer dog stories and that is a theme (alongside, death, loss, divorce etc.) that weaves its way through this book. I heard Ali Liebegott read from the book at an event we did together during AWP and knew I had to read the book because anyone who writes poetry about dogs, especially the love and impending loss of an old dog is someone whose work I need to read.
November 19, 2023
These poems were very confusing I understood some stuff at other times though it seemed weird or not correct timing wise, IDK, I did not like this book, nor would I recommend it to anyone, there are weird things in the poems that are mentioned that gross me or seem morally wrong, like getting your pets ears taxidermied, like just their ears. IDK if that's a thing but to me it seemed insanely weird and morally wrong.
July 7, 2019
Made me feel and reclect, but I prefer poetry that has a little more imagery and symbolism. This was very straight forward and read basically like a novel, just with cut up sentences. I like to wonder a little but exactly what the author is telling me and take my own interpretation of the work, and I just didn't really get that here.
Read
August 7, 2019I read this book in an evening -- something I haven't done in a very, very long time.
This was a beautiful, if not devastating read and totally unlike anything I have ever read before. It felt very honest and open and I felt very much connected to the writer as they walked us through their journey.
This was a beautiful, if not devastating read and totally unlike anything I have ever read before. It felt very honest and open and I felt very much connected to the writer as they walked us through their journey.
April 29, 2019
sometimes u gotta pull a sora and up your book count
May 2, 2019
Did I just cry on a plane because of this book?? Mayyybe.
June 15, 2019
Read it in one sitting and then started from the top and read it again. Captures loss and survival perfectly. It’s so tender.
September 1, 2019
A stunning capture of grief’s chokehold.
November 9, 2019
What a beautiful and powerful little book.
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