Near the Ipswich River in January

the winter birds grow so tame and hungry

that you can stand with arms outstretched,

palms spread with seed,

and the birds will alight,

tiny metallic feet

scribbling ideographs across your skin.

Swift strokes,

sparrow, chickadee, finch.

--from “Offerings”

 

 

“Facts are good for you,” Nora Mitchell writes in Proofreading the Histories, “like spinach or vitamins,” and in a wide-ranging collection of poems—from lyric, to chant, to elegy, to song—she surprises and sometimes stuns the reader with the force of her lines and her vision.

                  --Ron Schreiber