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Selected by Maggie Smith for the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for
Poetry, this debut collection of poems explores the aftermath of
history’s most powerful forces: devotion, disaster, and us.
Rooted in the Gulf Coast, A History of Half-Birds measures the line
between love and ruin. Part poet, part anthropologist, Caroline
Harper New digs into dark places—a cave, a womb, a hurricane—to
trace how violence born of devotion manifests not only in our human
relationships, but also in our connections to the natural and
animal worlds. Everywhere in these pages, tenderness is coupled
with brutality: a deer eats a baby bird, a lover restrains another.
“I promised / a love poem,” New proclaims, then teaches us
about the anglerfish, how it “attracts its mate / and prey with
the same lure.” In New’s exceptional voice, familiar concepts
take on a shade of the fantastic. A woman tastes the earth for
acidity, buries lemons and pennies for balance. Limestone “sucks
the sea / into little demitasse” and hyacinths “sip the sun /
black.” A lone elephant wanders into the wilderness of rural
Georgia, never to be seen again. But perhaps most arresting about
New’s work are the truths told by its strangeness, like the
ancient fish who “carved their shape” in a mountain’s peak,
or a mother who wears a lifejacket the bathtub. Crafted by New’s
voracious mind and carried by her matchless lyricism, A History of
Half-Birds is a stunning investigation of love’s beastly
impulses—all it protects, and all it destroys.
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