Words of a Feather
Updated: Aug 8
Published in 2021 by Humanities Kansas, Words of a Feather is a modest chapbook of poems and illustrations inviting the reader to “interact with the birds in your own backyard and with the stories, feelings and experiences of the poets in the collection.” With just ten poems and ten illustrations (wonderfully rendered by Brad Sneed), it’s impossible for such an offering to overstay its welcome but not quite enough to really sink your teeth into.
Whatever the merits of the poetry within, Words of a Feather accomplished, for me at least, its goal. Not three sentences in, and writing this while watching the birds in my own backyard, I stopped to begin my own poem about, you guessed it, birds. As a poet who largely writes about the prairie and my experiences in and with it, one might argue that such a prompt was, at least for me, unnecessary. I wonder whether it encouraged others who don’t identify as poets or writers to do the same. I’d like to think so, and, if I’m doing my part to create-slash-imagine the world I want to live in, I am certain of it.
Still, the project feels like a missed opportunity. It’s one thing to assemble a collection like this (three stars) and it’s another to encourage others to be inspired by it (four stars), but a call for entries would have put this over the top—a second collection (chapbook, website, other?) of writings inspired by Words of a Feather. Easier said than done, I know, but that would have been something.
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