YOUR MOTHER IS A NESTING DOLL

You model yourself after her, and she’s your doomsday guide to the future.

She’s the one who comforts you most: she is your home.

She is a nesting doll of losing: she is sick.

She waxes and wanes—a moon you wish would stay constant.

She is the only immovable thing.

I’LL BUY YOU A BIRD INSTEAD IS A BOOK ABOUT FINDING BY LOSING

What if the pain you feel for the person you love most is your only instruction manual on how to find yourself? What are healthy boundaries when the last thing you want to do is let her feel alone in the world? How do you reconcile your determination to protect your protector with the knowledge that, in a healthy parent-child relationship, things aren’t “supposed to” be that way?

I’ll Buy You a Bird Instead is a collection of poetry that illuminates the author’s struggle with these questions. Ultimately, it is a book about the fearlessness of love.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“I’ll Buy You a Bird Instead is a complex cry of longing—from a ‘throat veined white like a cut strawberry’—for the ever-disappearing mother. [This book] is a reminder that love can wreck us and still we can be ‘filled—like an urn—with its beauty.’”

—Laura Cherry, author of Haunts (Cooper Dillon Books)

With lyrical fluency, narrative precision, and imagery sharp as cut gems, Easton teaches us how to look, how not to look away, and how to find what matters. ‘Lodged like a wisdom tooth in [the] jaw,’ these fierce and tender poems affirm that at the end of pain, what remains is wisdom. What remains is love.”

—Angela Narciso Torres, author of What Happens is Neither (Four Way Books)