Life-List

Poetry. LIFE-LIST is a meditation on memory, love, and grief organized through the language of birding. From a fluttering first kiss to the frantic flapping of the last captive passenger pigeon on Earth looking for her mate, LIFE-LIST explores the relation of the individual to her incessantly disappearing habitat.



"we have lost something in the translation / of time into language," Jessica Smith writes in this lovely book of experimental poems, LIFE-LIST. But breaking open the words, she enables "that which would kill you" to burst into flowers, creating the space of breath, of spirit, of imagination to let the birds in this book of birds fly through. Ann Fisher-Wirth

"Dinosaurs did not go extinct. Approximately 10,000 extant species of birds appear to be descended from a subgroup of theropods, a heritage that includes our childhood idol T Rex as well as the bee hummingbird. Birders know the richness of heeding their presence & variety, the divination of alectryomancy, the creation of LIFE- LISTs. Any reader who heeds the n apart from hero in heron will recognize how birds articulate space & vice versa, how a life looking outward can be invested with our deepest interiors. The Brain, a very smart woman once wrote, is wider than the sky." Ron Silliman"