The Size of a Bird is an invocation of desire in times of violence and trauma. Refusing to shy away from difficult topics the poet tackles addiction, abuse, suicide, and sexual violence while infusing each word with a relentless drive for life. Seeking pleasure, these poems navigate dangerous terrain, staying with ambivalence and probing its depths. Queer femininity seeks heterosexual masculinity with varying results. First dates and one-night-stands, alleyways and coffee shops, forest floors and skateparks, these poems reveal a world pulsating with want and rife with pain. Holding both the reality of violence and the persistence of desire, these poems shine light on the pleasures and terrors of navigating sexuality from a space of femininity.
“Can poetry hold /the anxious thoughts of lovers?” This is only one of the many complex and gorgeous inquiries Clementine Morrigan asks in The Size of A Bird. Morrigan’s own poetry decidedly holds anxious thoughts, yes, but also desire, and trauma and healing, uncertainty and wanting, undoing and becoming—her second collection of poetry holds all of these and more.”
—Amber Dawn, author of Where the Words End and My Body Begins and How Poetry Saved My Life
“Morrigan’s new collection uses writing itself as an entry point insisting that what must be written include “the things that didn’t quite fit into the narrative, that didn’t quite make sense.” Her poetics and lyric prose make room for miscalculations of excess–sometimes a present tense and sometimes the shape of desire–”the size of a bird.” Her desire for our senses to co-simultaneously apprehend the world pushes the reader toward the glut of capitalism, the drugs and razor blades that could be survival. Morrigan’s poetic world is simultaneously periphery and centre, violence and desire, evoking lives that remember “divinity,” “the impermanence of being,” and “terrible promises.”
—nancy viva davis halifax, author of hook
“Clementine’s poetry is magical, raw, and real, in the best ways, and left me feeling hopeful.”
—Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People and Holding Still For as Long as Possible
Clementine Morrigan is a writer, artist, educator, and working witch. Their first book, Rupture, was published in 2012. Her second collection of poetry, The Size of a Bird, will be available from Inanna Publications in October 2017. Their creative writing has appeared in the literary journals Prose & Lore and Soliloquies, and her scholarly writing has appeared in the academic journals Somatechnics, The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, and Knots. They have also written for Guts Magazine. She is the creator of two short films, Resurrection (2013) and City Witch (2016) as well as being a prolific zinester with a current project titled Fucking Magic. Their creative, artistic, and scholarly works consider trauma, madness, addiction, sobriety, gender, sexuality, desire, magic, re-enchantment, environment, and more-than-human worlds. Additionally, she facilitates workshops and guest lectures on a number of topics, as well as providing professional tarot reading services for individuals and events. They are a white settler of Irish, Scottish, and English ancestry living on Anishinabek, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat land. She is a practitioner of trauma magic.
Now, I kiss him on the lips. When I kiss my lips make a sound. His kisses are silent. So I kiss him, making a sound. I pull on his t-shirt and I kiss his lips which are a dull shade of purple. He tastes like coffee and cigarettes. He is soft and smooth. His breath quickens as I touch him. I worry I can’t keep up. My desire is slower. It does not arrive on time. I kiss his neck. His jawbone. I use my fingers to press on his collarbone, gently, feeling the edges. There are so many bones in his body, wrapped as they are in his touchable skin. He calls me good. I say That’s what you said yesterday. He says You are so good to me. I have only met him twice. I laugh. I say No I’m not I just tell you stories about bugs. The cicada is still singing in the trees. The size of a bird. Do you know what I mean? My favourite part is when he puts his hand over my hand. It’s strange what will turn me on. Yes, please, hold my hand in yours. My hand is like a little shell, like a living creature, the size of a bird.
inannaadmin –
The Size of a Bird by Clementine Morrigan
reviewed by Jase Falk
Contemporary Verse 2: The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing – January 15, 2019
http://www.contemporaryverse2.ca/en/essays-and-reviews/snapshots/january-15-2019
Beginning with the poem “Write a Place for the Pain,” The Size of a Bird calls its reader to “find the words which are not words which are sounds.” Clementine Morrigan envisions language as a physical reaction to trauma—to find words to circle around and make attempts to explain the inexpressible. Longer prose poems sit in contrast with short, airy poems that resonate with tenderness: “My mouth / cups the vowel / It is sweet / between my lips.” Heartbroken and tender while also at times rough and unabashedly calling out the sexism of various lovers, Morrigan’s poetry deals with desire and the messiness of young relationships amidst the reality of sexual violence. This exploration of queer femininity moves through the transient spaces of cheap hotel rooms, skate parks, late nights at the bar, and beach days to bring affirmations of the possibility of a lasting love even in the face of disheartenment. Where Lau’s angst is present but veiled behind dinner scenes and the distance of old memory, the emotions in Morrigan’s poetry are fiery and close to the surface. This book contains an urgency which defies sentimentality and demands feminine desire be taken seriously and without compromise.
inannaadmin –
The Size of a Bird by Clementine Morrigan
reviewed by Tess Liem
Montreal Review of Books – spring 2018
https://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/poetry-spring-2018/
The Size of a Bird begins with an imperative. “Write a Place for the Pain” is affirmation as much as it is invocation. The muses being called forth are “the things that didn’t fit into the narrative, that didn’t quite make sense.” Clementine Morrigan continues to write directly about trauma, toxic relationships, sex, queer desire, and the attempt to accept one’s own memories.
Morrigan alternates between forms for each section of the book. The prose sections are immediate, often written in the present tense, and musical. In “Dead Raccoon on the Highway,” they contemplate their body next to another on a park bench and “sounds of shimmering sentences fill the space between silences.” Language hisses; the speaker is distracted by their own mind and the title image interrupts the present moment. This is how time and memory work in The Size of a Bird. The speaker occupies two realities simultaneously. One on the park bench and another in which her “body is not a dead raccoon.” This tension wavers throughout the collection and makes the reader a witness to the ways in which memories cannot be contained by past tense.
t’s worth noting the phrase that ends the first poem and the last: “I’m still alive.” Survival and the ways in which it is precarious amid relentless men, masculinity, and trauma frames this book. In “Mountains on the Moon,” they write, “I think I need his approval. I’m not even sure I like him.” With extraordinary clarity, Morrigan explores how this cognitive dissonance, the desire to please men who harm, is learned and reinforced, how “we talk about rape using academic words,” but also how there is a necessary “insistence on magic / in the midst of what / we were living with.”