Brandi Bird, Pitiful

 

HUNGER AS FIRE SEASON

I have wet eyes & want so badly to be loved a wall between
contrasts orange & blue sun & sky keep me comfortable
& don’t ask questions blush red girlish in light a choice to
stay in a house burning fire season white pills caught in my
throat I am a woman maybe dissolve fast currents no wisdom
just chemicals the flames say nothing I say nothing back try to
speak to flood no sound except thunder no lightning strikes
but new heat surrounds me fires distance made closer

The second full-length collection from Surrey, British Columbia-based poet Brandi Bird [reading in Ottawa this weekend as part of VERSeFest; see their 2023 “12 or 20 questions” interview here], following The All + Flesh (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2023), is Pitiful (Anansi, 2026), a collection composed as a singular and unsectioned assemblage of first-person lyric narratives and meditations around family story and history, and physical and emotional health, amid threads of pop culture stitched in for good measure. As Bird writes in the acknowledgments at the back of the collection: “Pitiful’s entire skeleton was written in only two delirious months. For the first time in my writing career, the poems that filled out and arose from me were unconcerned with anyone’s approval or understanding but my own. This method of writing feels dangerous to me. I felt and still feel immense responsibility to my community. But I’ve decided to trust myself and my desire. I’ve chosen to allow these poems to form the flesh, gross and imperfect shape of feeling.” They go on to offer: “I write in conversation with history, theory, pop-culture, and other writers and orators through time. Pitiful is a form of relationality done with the dirt inside me. Everything and everyone is alive.” Bird’s opening salvo is the poem “AUTOBIORAPHY,” a poem that sets the foundation for the collection: “This is the beginning of what’s certain. // Fullness is inevitability. No way out // of this pit where the sun shatters // into shards,” the poem begins, “tongued between feeds.” As the poem continues, further on: “To be sick // in this way is to reject without recourse. Orbit // the sun in a body that is // just a body.”

There is an open vulnerability to the poems that make up Pitiful, offering both process and declaration of meditative threads, whether musing on past events or extended hospital stays. “too much // of a good thing in bad times // means my father has // a story.” Bird writes, as part of the ebb and flow of the extended lyric “MAGICAL THINKING.” “tells me // to never eat rabbit // even if I’m lost // with nothing but tree bark // & snow.” Bird writes of psych wards and family stories, pop culture notes referencing Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Degrassi, threading process notes on holding and being and collecting the self, how one gets there from here; through the swirls of surrounding articulate and inarticulate chaos. “Time / is still so cruel to children.” Bird writes, as part of “CONTINUUM.” “I grow & grow / & never get closer to my beginning.”