If My Hands Were Birds: A Poem
by Sophia Falco
published by UnCollected Press September 2024:
PRAISE:
“Sophia Falco is a born learner and seeker, as her very name suggests, questing after the wisdom of a psychic-spiritual order that will transform herself lastingly. The title of her award-winning new book, If My Hands Were Birds: A Poem, suggests this utter yearning for flight, for release into becoming little birds lost, doves or falcons in flight across heaven and earth. This long quasi-narrative poem holds these felt tensions of embodiment as well as a Buddhist-like release from the prison-house (or bird cage) of flesh-meat into some airy creature of metamorphosis via sustained expression and a tender openness to change and future love. Poetry grounds and sustains these tensions, storms, and inner flux of mind and affect into achieved diary-like form, an ethos of creative activism and compassion, all elegantly and brilliantly collated daily as original poetry as in a state of renewed innocence, healing, and rebirth: for “my life was on the line” once again in these life-saving lines of poetry or like “a basketball in flight” as one last perfect shot.” —Rob Wilson is a poet-scholar who teaches in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz & author of When the Nikita Moon Rose as well as Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics.
Sophia Falco wields her poetry as lamp and lance against the darkness that surrounds us all — claiming her place proudly within the ranks of poets past whose private lifelong struggles with mental illness, sexuality, and silence she both echoes and embodies (from Emily Dickinson to Allen Ginsberg to Mary Oliver). In doing so she achieves brief flights and flashes of an almost zen-like insight: graceful as the arc of a basketball at the buzzer; gentle as the rustle of hands over paper. Reaching “outwards instead of inwards” for “a way out of this / mind maze.” And finding it here within these pages.” —Dr. Scott Lankford, Professor of English (emeritus), Foothill College Stanford GEN Global Educators Network
“Sophia Falco’s If My Hands Were Birds is a poem that shines a light on things often left in the dark. With her willingness to lay bare her struggles with mental health, sexuality, identity, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma, Falco reaches “below the surface” of “fear, and more fear, and more fear” into a place of compassion to discover that “maybe hope lies on that tiny songbird’s wings.” This epic poem asks the reader to consider not only what poetry is, but what it can be—a “lifeboat on land.”” —Kaecey McCormick, author of Pixelated Tears and Sleeping With Demons
“Sophia Falco reminds us in her powerfully resonant, deeply affecting work that the game is meant not for the NBA, NCAA, or AAU but for the championship of our souls.” —David Hollander, New York University Professor, and Author How Basketball Can Save the World
“Falco's epic poem is at once emotional and expressive but wholly accessible to the reader. Drawing on personal experiences and relationships, Falco's autoethnographic observations about themes such as life, love, sexuality, and mental health - to name but a few - provide deep insight into her personal journey through self-development and -awareness.” —Marlen Elliot Harrison, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief, The AutoEthnographer