2009

If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting

University of Georgia Press

“The tropic foliage of Anna Journey’s book is so lushly ashimmer with invitation and threat that it’s difficult to tell the two apart. Which is just what this poet intends: the world seduces us to enter, and to enter again, and to do so is both to find pleasure and to perish into a field of ghosts. Sexy, baroque, and southern to the core, this is a full-tilt splash of a debut.”

— Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems

“Anna Journey has talent to burn: gothic, elegiac, and celebratory by turns, her poems possess a giddy imaginative dexterity that is exceedingly rare in a debut collection. More important, there is a gravity and heft to her poems; they are willing to confront the Big Issues and militantly resist the easy tour de force. Jarrell says somewhere that a certain helplessness before her material is one of the poet’s principal tools. I hear that haunted helplessness in lines such as these: ‘I can’t stop— / the story // going like the tongue goes: // lit and loosed, moving, / like Lucifer, / down.’ Anna Journey is on the threshold of a significant career.”

— David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems

“In her spellbinding debut collection, Journey is the voice of that ‘adorable siren’ whose pleasurably startling images and exquisite perfect-pitch language recognize—no, bless—that all ‘cries want to be something else.’ It is simply one of the most magnetic books I have read in a long time.”

— Beckian Fritz Goldberg, author of Reliquary Fever: New and Selected Poems