When the Bird Is Not a Human floats the reader through domestic structures. Here, stillness ruptures the domestic hum. Here, rooms are animated principles haunted by dreams and revisitations. When every room in the house leads to a road inside a cloud under a lake, we wake in the double-take as we walk through the doorway again. What seems inanimate, isn’t.

“Poets and philosophers have long engaged the question of what it is we do when we name a thing. Do we contain it? Call it into existence? Lavish it with our attention? Domesticate it? Set it from its thing-ness free? To these questions When the Bird Is Not a Human says yes—and then proceeds to create into the space between word and thing building in the course of the book’s three sections the components of a house and a portrait of domestic life. The poem titled ‘The Yard’ for instance exists between its title and the silent movie the ‘we’ of the book projects on the back of their house proposing that in the world, as in the poem, names are essential vehicles but life—and poetry—is what happens within and between. As such, HR Hegnauer offers us the generous feeling of and, allowing us to float in a world that understands we are all always at one and the same time empty and full, awake and asleep, attempting to see and seeing.”

—Karla Kelsey