Flightless Bird is a book of poems that explores the plight and place of flightless birds in our imaginations and in the world. Ostriches, emus, great auks and dodos fill the pages, sharing their chronicles of resilience, fetishization, mockery and extinction. New stories also emerge - of disobedience, irreverent women, eroticism and abundance. It's a book about otherness and belonging - a collection of energetic, contemporary poems that seeks to unsettle old stories. Flightless Bird is a startling debut. Sensual, transformative, these poems are muscular embodiments of the imagination; they reach deep into you, alighting on flightlessness and the dream of flight - in both birds and humans. Energetic and pulsing with life, the lines leap, unflinching, and the heart is buffeted as we are whisked, gymnastic, from the domestic interior to the biosphere via all the contraptions the image allows. A literary and ecological tightrope walk, the collection dances in precise steps from soulful to encompassing. At their most poised the lyrics stretch to explore the intersections of feminine sensibility, shame, desire, domestic womanhood, cultural oppression and avian destruction, all done with wry composure, a balanced awareness of silences, extinctions, and the irrepressible urge to be alive and to be loved on the earth. The insights coalesce with quiet panache, arriving from inside and from far off. The alchemy is provoking, intimate and powerful. This is an exciting new ecofeminist voice: fresh, exquisitely bold, imbued with confident physicality, yet haunted with a serene acquiescence to ecological grief. -Miriam Darlington