“Sophia Falco is a born learner and seeker, as her very name suggests, questing after the wisdom of a psychic-spiritual order that will transform herself lastingly. The title of her award-winning new book, If My Hands Were Birds: A Poem, suggests this utter yearning for flight, for release into becoming little birds lost, doves or falcons in flight across heaven and earth. This long quasi-narrative poem holds these felt tensions of embodiment as well as a Buddhist-like release from the prison-house (or bird cage) of flesh-meat into some airy creature of metamorphosis via sustained expression and a tender openness to change and future love. Poetry grounds and sustains these tensions, storms, and inner flux of mind and affect into achieved diary-like form, an ethos of creative activism and compassion, all elegantly and brilliantly collated daily as original poetry as in a state of renewed innocence, healing, and rebirth:  for “my life was on the line” once again in these life-saving lines of poetry or like “a basketball in flight” as one last perfect shot.” —Rob Wilson is a poet-scholar who teaches in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz & author of When the Nikita Moon Rose as well as Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted:  An American Poetics.

https://therawartreview.com/2024/09/17/announcing-the-publication-of-if-my-hands-were-birds-a-poem-by-award-winning-poet-sophia-falco/