Kathryn Stripling Byer
“The Vishnu Bird is both a memorial and a memoir in lyric poetry. This clean-spoken, deeply-felt chapbook remembers the poet’s dear friend by tracing his vocation of anthropology, and honoring his spiritual depth, through vignettes from the speaker’s own past. Yet if this is a collection of last things, and past things, it also imagines next things.
The Vishnu Bird is above all a book of making-fabrics and lyrics, images and memories-whose textures are richly humane. Kathryn Stripling Byer’s elegiac articulations become, like all true poetry, ‘the hoop / in which we cast our stories’ in order to ‘hold [us] fast.'”
David Baker
ISBN 978-0-9897952-7-2