Good in Bed
Keystone Poetry

Seeing Things

With its focus on memory, illness, and their ramifications, Seeing Things explores overlapping roles of a daughter whose mother is entering the beginning stages of dementia and of a mother whose daughter is struggling with depression. These poems also witness a woman juggling her own memories of abuse and survival who lives in a world unsettled by shifting boundaries of truth and fabrication. Ultimately, Seeing Things explores the ways that we distort or preserve memory, define or alter reality, see or disregard those around us. This is a brave collection that gives voice to lament while at the same time welcoming “the hidden angels and saints” ever present along the way. Amid the anguish of loss and despair, it includes odes that dare to praise “each breaking day, dangerous / yet divine in all / its gorgeous glory.”

More Adult Books

  • Nothing in the world soothes the soul better than Gospel music.

  • A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.

  • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author.

  • In Juneteenth Rodeo, Bird's lens celebrates a world that was undervalued at the time, capturing everything, from the moment the pit master fired up his smoker, through the death-defying rides, to the last celebratory dance at a nearby honky-tonk.