You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis, the intimate second poetry collection from Kelly Weber (We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place), is a visceral exploration of chronic illness and asexuality.
Weber feels marked by "failure to want" and by recurring medical complaints--severe Crohn's disease and menorrhagia, initially dismissed by a doctor as menstrual cramps. In "Blood Firsts," she compares her first period with the later coming-of-age moment when she realized she is asexual. She describes herself as a teenage wallflower, aware of a same-sex pull but unsure what, if anything, to do about it. The series of lyrical definitions in "Queerplatonic" show her in love with a female friend: "I do not want/ your body but only want to go on listening to you talk about paragraphs,/ stanzas, how you crack back each like a rib cage to touch the raw heart/ inside."
Anatomy and nature supply the collection's interlocking metaphors. Animals appear frequently--but often as roadkill or taxidermic trophies. Weber aligns heterosexual partnership with mortal danger via the juxtaposed lines "I watch girls vanish themselves in marriages to men" and "you and I, watching rabbits dart under the tractor." Animal skulls and vibrant colors evoke Georgia O'Keeffe's American West landscapes ("Deer Skull Floating over Blue Mountains").
The structure varies, with prose paragraphs, columns, and text moving up the page. The rich stylistic palette (rhetorical questions, footnotes, second person, a call-and-response format) and sonic arsenal (alliteration, wordplay, anaphora) make for a courageous, unforgettable collection. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck