Description
Book SynopsisPoems in a range of forms that consider the queer body, chronic illness, and love amid rural plains landscapes. Set against a rural plains landscape of gas stations, wind, and roadkill bones littering the highways,
You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis is a love letter to the nonbinary body as a site of both queer platonic intimacy and chronic illness. Looking at art and friendship, Kelly Weber’s poems imagine alternatives to x-rays, pathologizing medical settings, and other forms of harm. Considering the meeting place of radiological light and sunlit meadows, the asexual speaker’s body, and fox skeletons, these poems imagine possible forms of love. With the body caught in medical crisis and ecological catastrophe, Weber questions how to create a poetry fashioned both despite and out of endings.
You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis explores forms with plainspoken prose poems with a mix of short poems and longer lyric sections that navigate insurance systems and complicated rural relationships to queerness.
You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis is the winner of the 2022 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest, chosen by Mary Jo Bang.
Trade Review“The speaker of these poems, sometimes with urgent pressured speech, sometimes with a cool remove, wants to tell us something. And we want to listen because what they say is like what we were just thinking. Or maybe like what we once thought. Once felt. Once did. Like that and yet different. This person’s way of being is inimitable. As is ours. Yet their words insist themselves into being something we were about to say. The words came out of their mouth and entered our language-primed minds by way of the eyes which read: 'Each day / I negotiate another way to live.' The associative leaps (circumstantially tangential) between being and becoming keep taking us to that place where: 'The word queer / is barbwire strung across pink sky and snow, / larkspur and lupine rising from pelvis.' Sometimes poems teach us how to be. Sometimes they simply let us be who we were all along. These poems brilliantly do both. I’m dazzled by the depths they reach. By the brightness of the language. The sharpness of the blade they use to carve a new world from the old.” -- Mary Jo Bang, judge of the 2022 Omndiawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest
“Modernity has degraded the ancient complexities of the erotic more deeply understood, not eros as servile to sexuality, but eros as the body’s ingathering of the world’s myriad vitalities—the same world which gathers our vital selves into it. In Weber’s
You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis the privative prefix a- spreads wild is loosestrife wisdoms: asexual, aromantic. In the queerplatonic lyric consciousness of these poems praise becomes primary imperative. Praise of the other, praise of the all, praise of 'every kind of sinful love /that’s love even without bodies conjoining.' The hope isn’t to hack the body’s troubling facts, nor is it to resolve its mysteries into dogma; the hope is 'to find the words for your queerness,' for all of our queernesses, so that we can hear, as this poet hears, the finchsong found singing in the marrow. Here disease works its dithyramb through the nerves, but the admission of pain allows sorrows seldom shared to garland themselves into a form of grace we all, if we dare, can wear. 'I’ve risked sharing my breath with you.' Yes, it’s true: these poems inspire.” -- Dan Beachy-Quick, author of "Variations on Dawn and Dusk"
“Weber’s extraordinary work is a remarkable testament to the power of language and of vulnerability. Lush and sensual,
You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis is an essential addition to aspec literature. Weber presents asexuality and queerness as a continual journey of exploration both of the self and of the self’s relationships to the body and to the wider community. It is particularly illuminating that this is a journey with 'no easy articulation;' rather, it is 'always a poem in the gap between leap and arrival, exhale.' In these luminous poems, Weber leads the reader to seek 'permission for a more honest language' to know themselves, celebrating the beauty of those who know themselves best in 'a language made of everything that doesn’t fit.'” -- Emma Bolden, author of "The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis"
