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Reading Journey, I’m often reminded of Sylvia Plath—the shifts between the sacred and profane, the voice at once profound and irreverent, the arresting descriptions of nature, the use of gothic and fairy tale motifs that prove everything old is new again. But Journey channels this influence to map out directions all her own.

When I sit down to write a poem, I think a lot about counterpoint. I think a lot about braided structure. If I want to write a poem, like “Golden Egg,” in which a speaker feels haunted by a past decision to donate her eggs to a fertility agency, I’m going to look for another thread to enrich that anecdote, perhaps one that amplifies the poem’s psychological or mythic resonances…

While The Judas Ear takes up the gothic themes and plaited lyrical structures that characterize Journey’s four previous books, its approach is more vigilant, more attuned to the latent dangers of both the body and the household.

Journey grapples with expectations placed upon the body: the body trying to exist and resist oppressive environments and the body in conjunction with a weighty familial lineage. She draws strong but jagged lines between self and the past . . .These pressures of heritage, contained within tightly woven poems, generate tension in this weighty collection.

Many female poets address sex in tones of victimhood, but Journey is downright predatory. Indeed, she’s all about ecstasy in the original sense, meaning to leave your state of being. But if living to the fullest requires ecstasy, then it also requires a dose of death.

In these poems we are often both inside and outside other bodies, particularly animals’ bodies. Journey presents a bestiary where her lyric I nimbly shifts shape.

The feeling of déjà vu lingers throughout the dreamlike Vulgar Remedies: moments of tack-sharp clarity are juxtaposed with fluid, unexpected leaps that leave the reader intrigued.

In these irresistible new poems we sense Journey’s growing ownership of the vulnerable temerity with which she excavates the sexual dark and imaginative luminosity of the past and its hold on her psyche.

For me, to write poems linked to the South is to write in the tradition of the jilted lover. It’s unrequited.

Like the exhibit from which Vulgar Remedies takes its name, this incantatory collection curates a space where past concurs with present, and where the narratives of the living and the dead braid in a single continuous insight.

Journey never forgets the basic scientific fact that vast amounts of energy can be transferred from one location to another, one form to another, in a split second. Think lightning bolt. Think five-car pileup.

All poets write from their obsessions: for Frank Stanford, it’s meditations on death and the delta; for Linda Bierds, it’s historical figures and events. Because we all write from our own peculiar psychic obsessions, there are often conversations between poems that begin to happen as you shuffle the pages. My obsessions in If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting are often mythic or fabular: I’ve got classical myths, family stories, Appalachian spells. I’m also interested in persuading a reader by voice.

It’s Journey’s absolute fidelity to a new, radically mythological, often magical mode of experience that makes If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting such an important first collection, truly worthy of its National Poetry Series winner designation.

Journey’s special topics—extended family, animals, insomnia, folklore, rendered in animated contemporary diction—make her verse no dead ringer for anyone else’s.

I’d say that I understand the macabre or startling image as an opportunity for transformation—a locus of metamorphosis—that often serves as a mode of braiding strands of time in the lyric. The locus—or locating grotesque image—is a concrete, visually arresting, often portal-like image that allows a poem’s speaker to move through time in a magical way, the way memory often feels vertiginous or time defying.

Marrying fact and memory with macabre imagination and erotic disintegration, Journey achieves a poetry of place that honors the complexity of the contemporary consciousness.

Like the second essay, a detailed account of being a student in a beginner’s taxidermy class taught by a former Disney employee, Journey carefully constructs a near-living creature out of her past and selective histories.

I would definitely call curiosity my modus operandi. What’s it like to slice open a starling and taxidermy its body? How does this gesture connect to our narrative impulse? To aspects of beast fable? To freezing time in lyric poetry? Why did my dad buy a leather trench coat from a German immigrant at a Bolivian airport in the seventies if he believed the salesclerk was probably a Nazi in hiding? Interrogating one’s own curiosity makes for an exciting mode of inquiry for essayists—it keeps us circling.

Journey, a poet, brings lyricism to her prose, writing about graveyards, infidelity, a tattoo artist named Captain Morgan, and, in the strongest piece in the book, a lesson about taxidermy with a starling, in which pulling back its skin “felt similar to pushing apart the fuzzy velveteen of a ripe peach.” These are intimate, delicate essays about the many skins we inhabit, illuminating even in their darkness.