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The Slain Birds
The Slain Birds
May 19, 2024 8:33 PM

Author:Michael Longley

The Slain Birds

**WINNER OF THE 2022 FELTRINELLI INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE **

'One of the most perfect poets alive. There is something in his work both ancient and modern. I read him as I might check the sky for stars.' Sebastian Barry

Michael Longley's new collection takes its title from Dylan Thomas - 'for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing'. The Slain Birds encompasses souls, slayings and many birds, both dead and alive. The first poem laments a tawny owl killed by a car. That owl reappears later in 'Totem', which represents the book itself as 'a star-surrounded totem pole/ With carvings of all the creatures'. 'Slain birds' exemplify our impact on the creatures and the planet. But, in this book's cosmic ecological scheme, birds are predators too, and coronavirus is 'the merlin we cannot see'. Longley's soul-landscape seems increasingly haunted by death, as he revisits the Great War, the Holocaust and Homeric bloodshed, with their implied counterparts today. Yet his microcosmic Carrigskeewaun remains a precarious 'home' for the human family. It engenders 'Otter-sightings, elvers, leverets, poetry'. Among Longley's images for poetry are crafts that conserve or recycle natural materials: carving, silversmithing, woodturning, embroidery. This suggests the versatility with which he remakes his own art. Two granddaughters 'weave a web from coloured strings' and hang it up 'to trap a big idea'. The interlacing lyrics of The Slain Birds are such a web.

Reviews

Using ornithology as a guide, Longley's exhilarating songbook offers a risk assessment of our world under threat... The Slain Birds is a book of quietude and disquiet in Longley's prolific repertoire.

—— Guardian

One of the most perfect poets alive. There is something in his work both ancient and modern. I read him as I might check the sky for stars.

—— Sebastian Barry

Michael Longley's poems have matched a sense of history and the brutal present with a recurrent feeling for the lyrical moment and the fragility of experience.

—— James Fenton

A contemporary who should endure over the life of our language.

—— Donald Hall

[Longley] at 83 is so secure as a great he can write poems of simple, pellucid beauty, touching universal experience.

—— Daily Mail

To read K-Ming Chang is to see the world in fresh, surreal technicolor... Both wild and lyrical, visionary and touching. Read her!

—— SHARLENE TEO, author of Ponti

Ferociously talented

—— JUSTIN TORRES, author of We the Animals

A whole body experience.

—— THEM

No one writes like K-Ming Chang. Wise, energetic, funny, and wild, Gods of Want displays a boundless imagination anchored by the weight of ancestors and history. These stories sing, a true force to behold.

—— KALI FAJARDO-ANSTINE, author of Sabrina and Corina

In the genre of feminine madness, these stories are to be worshipped. They are fearless, hysterical, violent yet full of grace. Each sentence escalates toward devastating, poetic insight about our bodies, about cultural demands both treasured and feared, and about what makes being alive a terror and a joy.

—— VENITA BLACKBURN, author of How to Wrestle a Girl

Chang returns with a dazzling collection of stories within stories that draw on old myths to embody the heartache and memories of Asian American women. Chang's bold conceits and potent imagery evoke a raw, visceral power that captures feelings of deep longing and puts them into words. This stellar collection will leave readers hungry for more.

—— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This book traces a line from old worlds to new worlds by means of the bloody umbilical cords that stretch between them. . . . These stories unthread the tangled relationships between mothers and daughter, aunts and cousins, siblings and lovers . . . a lingering sense that language, as well as life, is infinitely adaptable, no matter the ground on which it is given to grow. Lurid, funny, strange, and deftly sorrowing-an important new voice.

—— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Dazzling . . . This stellar collection will leave readers hungry for more.

—— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

[K-Ming Chang] rewrites the world as a place of radical transformation.

—— New York Times Book Review

[Her] ability, to take a common, decidedly earthbound, experience and transform it through her lens into a fantastical, otherworldly encounter shines. . . . Chang's writing reflects her gift as a lifelong listener of oral storytelling . . . and her ability to synthesize new ideas with her own spin on language.

—— San Francisco Chronicle

Chang has a special talent for forging history into myth and myth into present-day fiction. . . . Gods of Want is in some ways a fantasy of queer freedom. Its main characters, all Taiwanese or Chinese by birth or descent, are allowed to be who they are, to love and make love to whomever they choose.

—— Los Angeles Times

[K-Ming Chang] is back with her signature precise and enthralling prose in this short-story collection.

—— Shondaland

K-Ming Chang's inspired mix of magic and realism returns in full fabulist force. . . . The stories are eclectic . . . and united by Chang's fascination with the queer and quotidian in her characters' worlds. . . . Piercing.

—— Esquire

Her new short-story collection Gods of Want both widens and calcifies the expansiveness of her range. . . . Chang is singular amongst us all. . . . New work from Chang is a cause for celebration-a holiday in its own right-and it's also a reminder of the infinite possibilities on the page. . . . Nothing short of marvelous.

—— Bryan Washington , Electric Literature

Atwood brings her trademark wit and invention to bear on subjects as diverse as a pandemic, cancel culture, female friendship, witchcraft - and cats

—— Observer

Old Babes in the Wood... [is] a clear demonstration of her prevailing skill as a writer

—— Arts Desk

As her short story collection Old Babes in the Wood debuts at the top of the fiction chart, Margaret Atwood can rest assured that she has reached literary legend status. It was one thing for The Handmaid's Tale to make it to No 1, but quite another for stories narrated by snails and aliens to do it

—— The Sunday Times

Her latest collection of short stories... proves once again she's also an impassioned observer of everyday people and their struggles, with a hilarious sense of humour

—— RTE *Book Of The Week*

Each [story] is interesting in its own right...Atwood's imagination and mastery of storytelling is evident

—— UK Press Syndication

[A] writer who is still so sparky and brilliant in the sudden ways she tips you into despair or delight. Whatever she's up to, I'll take more if it's going

—— Alys Key , Spectator

Quietly devastating

—— Suzi Feay , The Tablet

Any new publication by the estimable Atwood...is an event and this collection of 15 short stories is no exception

—— Evening Standard

Bracing, darkly funny and cheerfully unsentimental

—— Guardian, *Summer Reads of 2023*

[A] masterclass in writing about the edges of everyday life. This collection of short stories that all link to the Sunshine State captures loneliness, alienation, abandonment and inner resourcefulness in the most creative of tales.

—— Victoria Sadler

Fantastical tales ... You'll be swept up in a wild hurricane of a ride with this lyrical stories of fury and love, loss and hope.

—— Newsweek

Each story is perfectly formed, exquisite, often troubling but there is something so brilliantly humane about her work.

—— Kate Hamer, Wales Art Review
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