PRE-ORDER: Birds I Cannot Name

Birds I Cannot Name, by Damien Uriah

**PRE-ORDER** Forthcoming Publication Date: April 22, 2025

*Pre-orders receive a bonus poem postcard*

Part ritual, part reclaiming of self, the poems in Birds I Cannot Name offer up a chorus of voices in sometimes discordant harmony. Beginning in the Oklahoma Ozarks and migrating toward the Pacific Northwest, this debut collection sings with reverence for the natural world while reckoning with the limits of human community. Damien Uriah crafts a vision of a landscape rooted in liminal spaces that feels deeply mysterious yet mystically familiar.

Damien Uriah is a poet, teacher, regenerative farmer, and musician. Their work can be found in Cimarron Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Thrush, Heron Tree, About Place Journal, and many other publications. Damien grew up on the Cherokee Nation side of the Ozark mountains and has lived, written, and worked in various places, including in their second land-love, the Pacific Northwest. Currently a professor of writing at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith, Damien lives with his wife and many plants and animals on a small eco-farm near his childhood home in Northeastern Oklahoma.

Praise for Birds I Cannot Name

“Birds I Cannot Name is a tiny masterwork, a folded little visionary map of the Ozarks that opens enormously to lead us to its mallards and egrets and frogs and cicadas, goats and coyotes, its hidden creeks, its old porches and single-wides and HUD houses, dirt roads and winter-bare trees, blackberries, wild herb and clover. And, most compellingly, to its people. Like the photographs of Sally Mann and Dorothea Lange before her, these poems look upon their human subjects with a profound understanding and affection we quickly come to share. Migrating as far as the American Northwest and back to his Ozarks again, Damien Uriah is as at home with his place and people as any young poet writing today.”

—Jonathan Johnson, author of May is an Island and The Desk on the Sea

“Damien Uriah’s Birds I Cannot Name suggests again and again that writing is a spiritual endeavor, an attempt to name things and an acknowledgment that there are things that elude naming. One thing the many different characters and speakers in this book share is a knowledge of their own transience, in poems and in life. One of the early poems in the book, ‘Mush,’ establishes this clearly: ‘In this place you have the mind and body of a boy, heavy / with the oils of mountain and first kiss.’ In this poem, we—the speaker and the reader—might have the mind and body of a boy, but in other poems, we’re other ages, other people. Uriah’s poems give us glimpses into what it is like to be a particular person in a particular moment in time, and those glimpses appear and vanish through the elegant and careful language he uses to craft them; the poems often end on an image that reinforces the fleeting beauty of being alive: ‘a hush of rain,’ ‘a thousand little pairs of wings,’ ‘pale blue sound.’”

—Laura Read, author of But She Is Also Jane 

“Birds I Cannot Name hums with emotional depth and lyricism. Layered and complex, it is full of elemental, meditative, and everyday rural images: fences, ghosts, snow, psalms, rain, cars, fields, sunflowers, and dust. There is a constant sense of death and renewal, of celebration and of grief. The collection is peopled with characters whose stories feel universal and also idiosyncratic, capturing in particular the uniqueness of some of its Ozark backdrop; it is cyclical and insistent in its repetition of titles and of characters, every time revealing each from a new vantage point until, true to its name, the reader begins to recognize all voices as one, as interior and exterior at the same time. The book solidifies this mythic feel in the poem ‘I Have Come into a Place Where There Is No Light’: ‘“Watchman remember,” says the old woman / sowing sunflower seeds in the courtyard of my body / calling to that frightened presence in the tower’—a passage that echoes the narrator’s own solitude and connectedness.”

—Polly Buckingham, author of The River People

“Birds I Cannot Name is a book keen on drawing us into the newness of knowing and of unknowing. Often looking to the natural world for an understanding that will ‘rev with the rhythm of all these birds,’ Damien Uriah writes deeply textured poems attuned to the unforeseen sway of lyric observation, to the experiential thresholds that might return some greater connections between beings and place.”

               
—Geffrey Davis, author of One Wild Word Away

Details:

• Publication date: April 22, 2025
  
• Trim size: 6 x 9 in
  
• 978-1-960215-35-2

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