Aviary of Small Birds by Karen McCarthy Woolf Michael Longley non-white body as both vulnerable

non-white body as both vulnerable ('flesh') and weaponised ('flèche')

these poems are also full of empathy and suffused with a quietly persistent faith

Amy Charlotte Kean gives us a ground level view of what makes us and breaks us

the runaway

invoking Penelope’s plight in Homer’s Odyssey as a model but also as a source of mystery

Aviary of Small Birds by Karen McCarthy Woolf Michael Longley non-white body as both vulnerableAn Aviary of Small Birds is both elegy to a stillborn son and testament to the redemptive qualities of poetry as a transformative art. The book opens at the birth, which paradoxically becomes the moment of death when, after a long labour and an emergency caesarean, the baby's heart gives out. For the mother, her body flooded with endorphins, euphoria gives way to shock, followed by an intense and visceral grief. However, just as grief itself is not