A Review of Nin Andrews' Son of a Bird [by Dante Di Stefano]

Son of a Bird
Nin Andrews
Etruscan Press, 2025

A little more than a year ago, Nin Andrews asked me to write a blurb for her new book. This is what I wrote:

Son of a Bird confirms indisputably that Nin Andrews is the greatest living technician of the prose poem in America. Andrews ranks with Edson, Simic, Benedikt, and Tate, as a virtuoso in the form that calls all poetic form into question. Son of a Bird is a memoir unwinding in vibrant lyric shards, bravely exploring the racial dynamics, the sexual politics, and the disappointments and consolations of family life below the Mason-Dixon line. By turns staunchly bucolic, achingly painful, riotously funny, and ruinously alive, the world Andrews arrays around us in this book vibrates with curses and wishes, birdsong and shadow, sunlight and the black smoke of burning alfalfa fields caused by a cricket’s fiddling. Andrews speaks across time to her past self, to her gay father, to her autistic mother, and to the mid-twentieth century South—and in speaking thus, she enjoins her readers to scan the fields of their own pasts, hunting for “memories like scared mice scampering through the grass.” Like that other famous Southern genius, Andrews knows the past is never truly past, it just keeps piping away in the nest outside your living room. Son of a Bird reminds us to open all the windows, listen, and hum along.

A few months ago, the book arrived at my doorstep, a beautiful 5x7 copy, about the size of those City Lights Pocket Poets Series books that have turned on generations of readers to Ginsberg’s Howl and Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (Is there anything more synonymous with a wild youth in poetry than to read “Poem [“Lana Turner has collapsed!”]” on a rooftop from a Pocket Poets edition). All of that to say, I love the physical dimensions of Son of a Bird. Etruscan Press, a press that has published two books of mine, consistently puts out handsomely made poetry collections, and Son of a Bird continues that tradition. I’ve been carrying around this little gem of a book with me everywhere since its arrival, marveling at the way Andrews constellates a memoir across prose poems with such ease, velocity, and savoir faire. When I said in the blurb above that Andrews is the greatest living prose poet in America, I meant it, and this mighty little tome confirms it.   

Before the memoir even begins, Andrews acknowledges the slipperiness of the genre to begin with: “In any memoir there is so much one must leave out. And of course, all memory is flawed. As the youngest of six children, I have learned that each of my siblings tells a different version of our childhood.” The prose poem, as a form, which questions form itself, encourages the kind of slant-telling that the memoir inevitably slides into and embodies. Notably, Andrews begins the memoir with a lineated poem, “Dear Past Self,” in which she (the speaker? Nin?) revisits her childhood home and is greeted by a vision of her past self in the farmhouse window. The imagined past self continually writes journal entries to the future self, inside (and outside?) the poem. Past and future elide in the owl screech and swoop of the poem’s eternal present. Andrews ushers the reader into a world where words form on a page, in a sentence that resists enjambment, in the book of the body, in the mirror of a bygone day, and “drift away in schools of tiny black fish,” only to be reconstituted in the next prose poem. Among these apparitions and convolutions, Andrews’ childhood comes alive.

Andrews recounts a childhood full of phantoms and visitations, surrounded by farmhands and siblings and presided over by the quirks and kindnesses of her parents. During one of the many surgeries and illnesses that pocked her elementary school years, Andrews sees Death, a towering specter with the head and wings of a crow. In an even more astonishing turn, at the end of the first section, Andrews imagines the time before she was born, sitting in a limbo-like space with her unborn sisters and brothers, hoping not to be pulled into being. From the supernatural imaginary, Andrews daringly careens through her girlhood, gently examining the racial politics of her Southern upbringing through the figure of her Black nanny, Miss Mary, who dies when she is five, but whose presence radiates throughout the text (the idiomatic expression that titles the book, “Son of a Bird,” comes from her lips). Andrews also delicately examines her mother’s Asperger’s Syndrome, and her father’s homosexuality, against the familial and societal pressure to remain silent on these topics. Son of a Bird crescendos with Andrews’ suicide attempt and attendant psychiatric care for bipolar disorder during her college years. The subject matter sears, but, in Andrews’ hands, the bell jar never truly descends—Nin Andrews’ prose poetry is far too unruly and jaunty and soaring for that.  

Read this book. Dwell in the deep-down counter, original, spare, strange bravery of Nin Andrews’ prose poetry. You’ll find yourself mouthing “Little Pea” and “Son of a Bird” along the pastures and meadows and dirt roads of a numinous Charlottesville, Virginia, and you’ll be better for it.

Dante Di Stefano's most recent book is The Widowing Radiance (Bordighera Press, 2025)

Comments

[Emily Fragos]

Congratulations, dear Nin, on the new book. This is an exquisite achievement.

[Sally Bliumis-Dunn]

This book is woven together with delicacy, humor, wisdom, heart and, of course, Nin's great intelligence. Brava!