A Language for Extinction: Zaina Alsous’s A Theory of Birds
And if you ask of her to come to you, her answer is refusal.
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Posts Tagged: birds
Rumpus Original Fiction: Overlook
To be a woman in this world is to be adopted by other women.
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Too Bright to Belong: A Conversation with Clare Beams
Clare Beams discusses her debut novel, THE ILLNESS LESSON.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Flap
A flap to determine entry, or deny it. A flap whose failure determines choking.
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Sweet Bird
Every story needs to begin in a place of stasis, a comfortable zero.
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R.I.P.: Baby Bird
So much land, so much quiet.
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Making a Nest within a Book: Kevin McLellan’s Ornitheology
In my reading, Ornitheology turns out to be a book of psalms.
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First and Last Songs: The Extinct Song of the Kaua‘i ‘Ö‘ö
I wanted to talk to someone who might have heard the last animal at the end of its species’ five-million-year run on earth.
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A Book with Wings: Bird Book by Sidney Wade
There is an acceptance of the strangeness of things in these poems, even a generosity big enough to invite the oracle in for dinner.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “Pigeon Manifesto”
The revolution will begin at your curb, in the shallow pool of shade that is your gutter.
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On Birds, Cats, and Children
My devotion to the cats was not an imitation of human motherhood. To confuse the two, I thought, was an insult to both.
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Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from I, Parrot
An exclusive excerpt from I, Parrot, by Deb Olin Unferth & Elizabeth Haidle, forthcoming from Catapult and Black Balloon on November 1.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “Goldhawk”
In the last moment, the bird swerved away to the right. It soared high, wheeled in a circle, and dove again. This time, it pulled itself directly upward. Gold plumes flashed as it rose, wings churning as it turned.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Pet Store
The boy is looking for something specific. I can tell. It shows on his face when he scans the shelves and doesn’t find it.
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The Hawk in Me
I continue to adapt. I do all of this because I cannot run away, not really. There is nowhere to go. The hawk is the thing within me.
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White Noise
People never detail the confusion—the way days feel like years, and seconds like hours.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: To Prey on Birds
I am alone. Alone with my small size, my cracking bones, and the guilt that wraps around my spine like a jungle vine. Don’t be hysterical, I repeat to myself.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Boy meets lichen, proves 150 years of science textbooks wrong. Want to improve your social skills? Try fiction, not speed-dating. How wasps gave us Shakespeare. In psychology, American undergrad = caveman. Birds lose sex appeal when singing over city noise. (Unlike Benedict Cumberbatch.)
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If Klingon is a living language then Latin sure as hell isn’t dead. “I think therefore I am,” but for animals. Solving history’s mysteries with poop. The Internet is ruining the planet in more ways than you think.
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The Hermit and the Hawk
As the morning progresses I become less interested in where Zirrer had lived, and more interested in what brought him here to begin with. Why, I wonder, does a man choose to opt out of the world?
...moreOn Birds in the Wild
In a hauntingly poignant review of Helen Macdonald’s lovely H Is for Hawk, the Los Angeles Review of Books’s Dinah Lenney writes about her own experience of loss and the turning toward the natural world: In grief, what I found: birds reassure. Birds as representatives of a universe that will go on with or without us. […]
...moreSave the Birds: A Rumpus Roundup
Jonathan Franzen is an avid bird lover, as anyone who read Freedom might have guessed. Two weeks ago, Franzen wrote a piece for the New Yorker that, among other things, condemned the Audubon Society for focusing too much on climate change and not enough on conservation, the society’s original mission. Focusing on climate change is […]
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Waved Albatross
How do we make the good thoughts stay? Can we make them stay? It’s so hard to keep in mind the slivers of time that change our lives for the better.
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The Most Terrifying Art Project in the World
Here’s a totally normal thing that exists: a lake with a pH so far to the base end of the scale that when birds crash-land in it, they not only die but also calcify. Of course, like any everyday person would do, photographer Nick Brandt gathered up the mummified bird corpses, posed them, and took […]
...moreThe Diviner’s Tale
Morrow’s supple prose is grounded in lyricism, prose unafraid to give the reader both the forest and the trees. Bradford Morrow’s new novel, a feminist interpretation of fairy-tale tropes, explores the life of Cassandra: single-mother, teacher, dowser.
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