A History of Half-Birds

“A History of Half-Birds, an inventive and impressively wide-ranging collection, has me considering and reconsidering the connections between seemingly disparate things: between poetry and science, both fueled by curiosity, imagination, and possibility; between history and myth, precision and ambiguity, the known and the unknown. In the Anthropocene, we may be tempted to ask what poetry can do for us when what we need are tools for survival. I’d argue that these poems are just that—expertly crafted, satisfying to hold and behold, and sharp enough to dissect what needs dissecting. We‘re so lucky to have this book here and now.”

─ Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod
read at Milkweed Editions

“Like a ‘flashlight / prying through the night swamps,’ Caroline Harper New’s poems delve into the dark and treacherous corners of ourselves to ask, ‘What would any of us do / if freed?’ Through conversations with doctors and paleontologists, she traces ‘what’s left of a body,’ eroding the borders between human and non-human: inside a humpback whale she finds a sitting room, and it is unclear whether the floating lights of a Florida street are jellyfish or chandeliers. When ‘the future prickles dark at your spine,’ Caroline Harper New’s A History of Half-Birds teaches us that our only hope is to return to the body, to open our ‘shoulder / blades and dig.’”

─ Maia Elsner, author of Overrun by Wild Boars
read at Milkweed Editions

“In the wake of utter and ongoing ecological devastation in the Carolinas, I’ve returned to this collection, spun out of flooded deltas and hurricane days. From where I stand, the port at work in “A History of Half-Birds” is an expert with staggering interdisciplinary valence; a cloaked shepherd heralding sunshine…Sister taxa—your focus is sublime. New performs precision work on enormities and unseeables: an anthropologist of the most rapturous feeling.”

—Grace Ezra, editor of Hood of Bone
read at Hood of Bone

“The poems here, both intimate and inquisitive, both personal and public, seethe with life in all its myriad forms: carob seeds ‘so consistently shaped their weight was used / to measure gold,’ a bird dog who won’t hunt, and pigeons who ‘invented their own religion.’ In the midst of this collection’s menagerie of animals and plants both living and extinct, however, A History grips readers most fiercely when the poems investigate the brokenness, the resilience, and the ruggedness of the people within them: an ex-lover and a current one, a mother and those who came before her, the founder of an elephant refuge, and many more.”

─ Matthew Del Busto, Michigan Quarterly Review
read at Michigan Quarterly Review

“This poetic investigation finds that pain and love are intertwined during these trials… The past, present, and future are tinged with wondering what could have been if details had been altered… The poems ask and answer how we got here, and yet they also cannot look away from looming catastrophes either… Chaos and change are not a matter of if but when for these poems.”

─ Martha Stuit, Pulp
read at Pulp

“‘Notes on Devotion’ operates almost like the clockwork or other mechanicals it mentions, different gears turning into each other—the idea of conditioning, that of love and the inescapability of loss, the nature of ritual, and what can (and can’t) interrupt all of these things—clicking into place by sound and association. Or another mechanical analogy: it moves like a combination lock tumbling into place to release. The poem is intricate, uncanny, heartaching, and almost infinitely rereadable.”

—Rebecca Lindenberg, author of Love, an Index, on “Notes on Devotion”
read at Cincinnati Review

“Steeped in Gulf Coast flora and fauna, Caroline Harper New’s A History of Half-Birds is a gorgeous collection of poems that spins widdershins like a hurricane. This book embraces life’s complicated dualities—the precarious gravity of Saturn’s rings, nightmares that visit with every new love, the way an anglerfish attracts both its mate and prey with the same lure. Equally embracing facts and lyricism, New weaves stray opossums and beached whales into love poems, jellyfish and memory into a chandelier. Each poem is full of the world’s intimate facts that suddenly become mirrors. They are tender and wise and illuminate their mysteries. It’s a truly beautiful debut.”

─ Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
read at Milkweed Editions

“A History of Half-Birds is a robust and enterprising collection of real and imagined dreamscapes designed to provoke the subliminal and visceral to beautiful effect, or maybe to butterfly effect, as the poems all support the notion that our world is deeply interconnected…These poems are bold and elegant charms and full of shamanic vigor — a fantastic premiere collection of poems by an enthralling voice. As stated clearly in the poem of the same name, ‘Widdershins,’ witchcraft, augury, lunacy, and devilry are worthy of account, and how one solves a riddle relates to how one tells a story: ‘We study the past to know the future.’”

─Mikal Wix, West Trade Review
read at West Trade Review

“[A] strong working knowledge of this discipline, an eye for the place where the human and non-human meet, roundly informs her poetic practice in this marvelous new collection. The book is a field study of the world and of the heart…[T]here is a sense of preparation through formal and informal erudition, meant to complicate what it means to write adequately about natural and human worlds, with fewer données and more of a sense of a non-human cosmos, one of manatees and marsupials, in which each creature’s essence isn’t given to us easily. Instead, we have to figure it out, one specimen at a time.”

—Johnny Payne, editor of Merion West
read at Merion West

“There’s an untamed luminescence to Caroline Harper New’s debut, A History of Half-Birds, a collection steeped in science and mythology. Out of the floods and hurricanes of the Georgia delta, near Florida and the Gulf Coast, New forges a watery world made up of wild horses, the live mermaids of Weeki Wachi State Park, hurricane sisters ‘running around the Gulf naked,’ and ‘half-birds,’ who are ‘half-woman, half-bird : feathered like the loon with bones thick enough to plunge their low-slung bodies through the ice.'”

─ Rebecca Morgan Frank, author of Oh You Robot Saints!
read at Poetry Foundation

“‘Interview with a Cervidologist’ imagines the roadside grit that it takes to be an urban, post-apocalyptic survivor, human or otherwise. And in that otherwise lies the poem’s strength and its challenge to readers. What do we take for granted and why? What are the costs? I hope you will take the journey that this poem offers to accept uncertainty: to feel unsettled, to feel that you’re not quite sure what’s going on and never quite safe in your knowing.”

—Ki’en Debicki, on “Interview with a Cervidologist”
read at Malahat Review

“I admire the vast distances crossed here—from the lake with its threatened herd to the differently threatened rings around Saturn, from the immediacy of the speaker’s moment to Galileo’s time to the future 100 million years from now. Intimacy can be lonely in a world so vast. No wonder the speaker wants something small, tangible, and nameable: ‘To hold a face between my hands and call it golden.’”

—Carl Phillips, author of Then the War, on “Elk Lake”
read at Palette Poetry