Interview: Hayden's Ferry

Bird Feed: media sculpture
by Ashley Zelinskie

...in which I talk bird coffins, grocery shopping in Amman, and obsessing over misplaced syllables. Please click over to read the full conversation.

*

"When a friend texted 'this made me think of you,' along with a photo of an ant-eaten finch she’d found half-devoured beside her doorstep, I knew it was time to reconsider my relationship with winged things! I’m not a birder by any means. I’m lousy at species identification. The title of my book, however, is telling. Although Two-Headed Nightingale features poems on dismantled sparrows as well as taxidermied hummingbirds housed in the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the collection also includes other expressions of flight. The title phrase, for example, not only gestures toward Keats’s “immortal bird,” but is also the 19th C. stage name of conjoined songstresses Christine and Millie McCoy...."