Poems in a range of forms that consider the queer body, chronic illness, and love amid rural plains landscapes. Set against a rural plains landscape of gas stations, wind, and roadkill bones littering the highways,
You Bury the Birds in My Pelvisis a love letter to the nonbinary body as a site of both queer platonic intimacy and chronic illness. Looking at art and friendship, Kelly Weber’s poems imagine alternatives to x-rays, pathologizing medical settings, and other forms of harm. Considering the meeting place of radiological light and sunlit meadows, the asexual speaker’s body, and fox skeletons, these poems imagine possible forms of love. With the body caught in medical crisis and ecological catastrophe, Weber questions how to create a poetry fashioned both despite and out of endings.
You Bury the Birds in My Pelvisexplores forms with plainspoken prose poems with a mix of short poems and longer lyric sections that navigate insurance systems and complicated rural relationships to queerness.
You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis is the winner of the 2022 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest, chosen by Mary Jo Bang.
Kelly Weber(she/they) is the author of
We Are Changed to Deerat the
Broken Place. She is the reviews editor for
Seneca Reviewand has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in a
Best American Poetry Author Spotlight,
Gulf Coast Online,
Electric Literature’s The Commuter,
Hayden’s Ferry Review Online,
Southeast Review,
Salamander, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University.
“The speaker of these poems, sometimes with urgent pressured speech, sometimes with a cool remove, wants to tell us something. And we want to listen because what they say is like what we were just thinking. Or maybe like what we once thought. Once felló7