A nest blew down

Although austere in tone, the poems of A nest blew down are rich with candid, moving anecdotes and striking imagery. These poems are hardscrabble-stark, but deeply wise. Resigned to seeing missed opportunity as "just a wish whose candle / was never blown out," Casey Killingsworth nonetheless urges us toward compassionate acts, "because you have to, because you / can't go back empty-handed / without helping the world out / just a little." Blunt and urgent, this is the voice whose "own dream was the one with sad / marriages and night shifts, first and last month's rent." This voice resonates with hard-won tenderness.

-Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

Discovering A nest blew down is like waking to find you've grown "wings to take you / somewhere else." Someplace crisp and uncluttered, where novelty is tucked neatly into the corners of every heavy truth, buoying up life's sunken wreckage so we can glimpse the treasures the pirates missed. Someplace where every silent stanza has its music, every senseless human loss its logic. Some manicured wilderness of a place where you'll encounter blue jays that are "the teletype machines / from 1950s stock market movies," a cat that's a memento mori, a duck that's "a sign that the world doesn't / operate according to signs." Once you've entered Killingsworth's somewhere else, you won't mind the destruction of that old place, that blown-down nest you once called home.

-Soma Mei Sheng Frazier, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Creative Writing, Oswego State University of New York