The Bird You Are
By Lisa Dart
New Release
ISBN: 9798987135945
ISBN: 9798987135952
About the Book
“I’d like to be a painter,” writes Lisa Dart in these brief, stunning portraits. Each prose-poem is addressed, epistle-like, to her mother, as though the once strikingly beautiful red-head, now diminished by illness, loss, and age, into a white-haired rarely lucid woman, might explain the inexplicable truths of their entwined and tragic history. A train’s evening-lit passing, sheepskin ankle boots with snow melting on their tread, the pulse of an emergency room heart monitor— this lyrical and searing language paints a moving picture of the painful but ultimately loving relationship at the fluttering heart of this collection.
Reviews
Exquisitely vivid and fitting, Dart’s image of her mother as a bird is at moments uplifting, at others heartbreaking.
—ANDREA HOLLANDER, author of And Now, Nowhere But Here
These poems act as tender, loving testimony to a difficult and beautiful character.”
—KIM LASKY, author of Eclipse and Petrol, Cyan, Electric
About the Author
Lisa Dart is a poet and prose writer. A finalist for the Grolier Poetry Prize (USA, 2004), The Aesthetica Poetry Competition (UK, 2013), and The Troubadour International Poetry Prize (UK, 2022), she has a doctorate in creative writing from the University of Sussex (UK). Her poetry has appeared in many journals, including Eastern Iowa Review, Tears in The Fence, and The London Magazine. She is the author of The Linguistics of Light (poems, Salt, 2008); Fathom (prose memoir, Free Association Press, 2019); This Thing of Darkness (IPBooks, 2024), a highly experimental illustrated book using multiple texts, which won a British Arts Council Award; and Even So, This Song and The Bird You Are (Shangana Press, 2025).
Events
Oct 8, 2025 (Wednesday) 6pm – 7pm
Broadway Books
Poets Andrea Hollander and Paulann Petersen read from and discuss UK author Lisa Dart’s newly released poetry works Even So, This Song and The Bird You Are.
Andrea Hollander’s sixth full-length poetry collection is And Now, Nowhere But Here (Terrapin, 2023). She is the winner of numerous honors, including two Pushcart Prizes (poetry and literary nonfiction) and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2011, after more than three decades in the Arkansas Ozarks, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she created The Ambassador Writing Seminars, which she teaches out of her home.
Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, is the author of seven previous collections of poetry. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Birmingham Review, Catamaran, Tikkun, the Internet’s Poetry Daily, and POETRY IN MOTION, which placed poems on the Tri-met busses and lightrail trains in the Portland area. The Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds has chosen her poems as the lyrics for four of his choral compositions, including the song that ends the award-winning Latvian film Es Esmu Seit and– most recently–his three-part song cycle Naming the Rain. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. In 2006 she received the Holbrook Award from Oregon Literary Arts, and in 2013, Willamette Writers’ Distinguished Northwest Writer Award. As Oregon’s 6th Poet Laureate, she traveled over 27,500 miles within Oregon, visiting all of its 36 counties to give workshops, readings, and presentations at schools, libraries, and community centers.