Rara Avis
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Regally bearing its Latin title, Rara Avis captures in sparse, moving verse both the splendor and the loneliness of what it means to be exceptional — a rarified specimen, a strange bird. A son, a husband, and now a father, seasoned poet Blas Falconer explores the relationships among men — between peers, lovers, parents and children — to consider and question existing models of authority and power. Falconer’s lucid but feeling gaze reveals social complexities with searing and graceful imagery, asking what it means to live outside the heteronormative experience while existing as a man, simultaneously a casualty and a participant in the project of masculinity.
These poems carefully delineate the casual cruelties of queer youth and the beautiful and bitter revelations of adulthood. The wisdom propelling Rara Avis is the knowledge that we are each of us that rare bird; we share our singularity. Everyone has a pancreas, but only one organ matters when Falconer learns his father is afflicted. Alchemized by love, one thing, unlike any other, becomes all things. “All day, everything, / no matter how / small, makes me // think of it” … The bee / crawling in / blossoms // scattered on / the glass/tabletop. The sound of // a pitcher fill- / ing slowly / with water.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This pensive volume from Falconer (Forgive the Body This Failure) explores masculinity through a matrix of relationships that define and transform what it means to be a man in today's world. Employing the metaphor of the rara avis—the rare bird—Falconer questions a heteronormative masculinity whose ideology is violently conferred: "Force-fed mice, sparrows, it couldn't expel the bones, the claws, and died having eaten too much." While the speaker of these poems endeavors to consider his own masculinity more thoughtfully, he often struggles to transcend his childhood experiences. In one poem, after scolding his sons for fighting in the backseat of the car, the speaker imagines his frightened children as adults confronting a masculinity that remains "a field of trees/ they can't see through/ and must guess/ instead what lies/ beyond it." Elsewhere, a bedtime story featuring the death of a father becomes a way for the speaker to reflect on the pathos and wonder of being both the son of a dying father and a father of two adopted sons: "Sometimes you want// a story to last forever, and sometimes/ you just want to know how it ends." Haunting and moving, these poems wrestle with past experiences to envision new possibilities.
