If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting

National Poetry Series

by Anna Journey

In this debut collection, Anna Journey invites the reader into her peculiar, noir universe nourished with sex and mortality. Her poems are haunted by demons, ghosts, and even the living who wander exotic landscapes that appear at once threatening and seductive. In these poems, her sly speaker renames a pink hibiscus on display at Lowe's, "Lucifer's Panties"; another character chants, "I'd fall devil / over heels over edge over oleander"; and one woman writes a letter to the underworld:Dear black bayou, once, by a river

I bit a man's neck. His scent: the raw

teak air husked inside stomachs of six

Russian nesting dolls--the ones in the attic I pulled

apart and open. The ones I

pulled apart and open like Styrofoam cups.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2009

About the author

Anna Journey is an American poet and essayist who was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry.

Reviews

[Janna Shaftan · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful brilliant elegant

& seductive

one wild swirl in each iris, each center a mix of pitch
and Byzantium about to catch.

There is a remedy for all of this
or none of it. An old man’s advice:

don’t let a morning pass
without swallowing nine
gin-soaked golden raisins. Do this to keep

arthritis at bay.
Or for the hell of it.

While she wonders why the only man to tell her

what’s sexier than nudity
was an art critic and not a lover.


—-

How many thousands
of ancestors peer through you like a luthier
stopping for right key,

the perfect hollow matched -
itself to itself.

——

It’s never enough to remain in the body.

A turtle’s bare shell
disembodied, backbone in high relief,
topsoil caught in the vertebrae

while the mottled birds watch us
from the stand of live oaks
we’ll dig it out each time

like a dark song,
that whiskey on the tongue.


This collection meant a lot to me.

[Aria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Noir-like with provoking and bold imagery. Reading this collection is like being stuck in a thick and foggy past where reality and fantasy seamlessly melds with one another. Personally, I prefer her later collections as the poems here are a little too difficult (or well, too personal like it's a secret language unknown to me) for me to understand.

[Connie Hernandez · Rating 2 out of 5]

I flip flopped a lot on whether I liked this book or disliked it. There were particular poems that revealed themselves to me more and more as I reread them and read them in sequence, and I think Anna Journey's use of symbolism and rhythm is artistically beautiful. However, it is abundantly clear to me that she is a white cis woman.

From the very first poem she talks about transgender prostitutes in a distasteful way and on many occasions her difficulties with her sexuality seem to prevail over the comfort or value of others. I wish her the best with those feelings as they obviously confuse her, as is human, but starting off the book with a slur is rough.

She also uses the g-slur for Romani people, and uses a pretty shallow appropriation of Japanese imagery in a sexual way that just doesn't sit right with me!

I was also unsure if I was just bad at reading her tone but there were quite a few poems that made me wonder if she was supposed to be sympathizing or making fun of like, old dead slave owners in the south. To be very honest I was just kind of on edge for the whole book (or at least what I read).

Overall her writing style can be really nice but is heavily laden with plants who's meanings I have to Google, and after a while I just got tired.

I respect her human confusion and the vulnerability of her poetic voice, but I was uncomfortable as a trans poc, and that's that.

[Gaea Ridenhour · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems are semi-chaotic and bring up vivid surrealistic imagery, sort of like a modern woman’s poetic spin of a Dali painting. I definitely enjoyed reading these poems right before bed, it felt like I was peering into someone else’s dream right before I was about to slip into my own.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

What does this house think it's doing
still bodiced
in water damage and poor boards?

[Mohammed Farhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Drastically underrated.

[Mehnaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

She’s brilliant

[Mikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful collection of poetry--strong, vivid writing. Powerful in both language and subject matter. These are not poems to be idly skimmed over, but instead, they need to be slowly read and reread with thought and active imagination.

The poems often overlap or have thematically connecting imagery that runs cohesively throughout the book. There are four chapters and unlike much poetry which can be read in nonlinear fashion, I would not suggest that method for this book as it builds poem by poem.

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

the language is beautiful, but i never felt invited to participate in journey's delicately constructed world. instead, the entire book i felt like an outsider looking in, yet that didn't feel organic to the work. i'd like to read more of journey's poetry, because it promises something intriguing and unique. her blend of the personal and the baroque is refreshing.

[Jane]

There were two poems in here that I loved and re-read.

[Saba Razvi · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorites. Definitely one of the best books I've read in the past five years. I'll look forward to another collection by Anna Journey.

[Dana · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of poems.

[Juan Carlos Toledo Núñez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poems about life, death, prosthetics and relatives ghosts...

[Andrea MacPherson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous language, startling imagery. Very vivid, clear descriptions of Journey's southern childhood, and the ghosts that inhabit her life.