Son of a Bird (Etruscan Press 2025), is a disarmingly fascinating memoir of a childhood on a dairy farm in Virginia that is told in a collection of prose poems by well-established poet Nin Andrews. While there are some harsh memories, on balance it is a book with a great deal of charm—and courage. Andrews uses her talent for imagery and lyrical language quite well in telling her story and her combination of narrative and poetic techniques has yielded an excellent, innovative memoir. As in the best traditional memoirs, the story arcs and character arcs are compelling and well-drawn in this work.
As a child, Nin Andrews suffered many eye surgeries. Her father is gay, her mother is autistic, and Andrews is not going to have anything approaching a “normal” childhood (whatever “normal” is). And in choosing to write a memoir in verse, she will not have a conventional memoir. Yet she conjures up such a vivid chronicle, rich with family, nature, farm life, beauty, and a multitude of conflicts and challenges that her poetic memoir becomes wonderful, engaging art.
That this is art—not straightforward autobiography—is clarified in her opening notes where Andrews explains she has created some composite characters and changed some names to protect privacy.
Strong, emotional descriptions are included about Miss Mary, a black woman who cared for Andrews until her death when Andrews was five. It was Miss Mary who gave Andrews the nickname “son of a bird.” Her father explains in this passage:
“She called you Little Pea when you behaved, Son of a Bird when /
you were naughty. Whenever she lost track of you, we’d hear her /
hollering, ‘Ain’t nobody seen hide nor hair of my little Son of a Bird?’ /
After a while, the farmhands called you Son of a Bird too.”
In “Dear Past Self,” the opening poem, readers are introduced to Andrews, who will carry the various stories with verve and style. This past self has “pink glasses and tiny eyes,” but as quickly established in this and subsequent poems, she is keenly observant even with her wounded eyes. She also sees death often as a haunting and physical presence—a giant black bird with a crow’s head and wings. She writes that she “was born with a death wish that hovered like a bird on the windowsill of my childhood.” Andrews also reflects that her mother told her not to “tell anyone if you’re hearing voices. And don’t ever mention the visions of death you had as a child.” That Andrews is a strange child, one who is “an insomniac, already / staring out the window at the dark,” is part of the power of the collection.
In another early poem, “The Book in my Chest,” readers begin to meet more of the family—Andrews as a “screaming, cross-eyed towheaded / baby” with a bald father wearing “browline glasses and tweed trilby hat.” Also in that poem, Andrews’ mother appears with “her hair permed tight as a poodle’s.” The father is a perfectionist, but the mother far more casual about child raising, a mother who “shrugs, certain I will have a soft landing no / matter how far I fall.”
Early in the collection, there’s a chilling poem about Andrews, then “a skinny, freckled girl, stretched / out in a bed.” She is enduring a medical procedure in which the doctor later in tears proclaims “We thought we’d lost you,” he said, adding, “anesthesia is / not your friend.” To which Andrews then observes: “Anesthesia, I thought then, was a Russian princess / or evil stepmother who poisoned me again and again.” Andrews five eye surgeries between ages one and fourteen is a recurring subject. Her vulnerability make these poems particularly poignant.
The collection is organized into seven parts with titles. The autistic mother is the focus of the segment called “My Mother Was a Little Brown Bird.” Andrews’ mother was a classics scholar who sometimes “would recite passages in Ancient Greek, the strange words like / insects crawling into my thoughts and nesting in the dark hollows / of my bones.” She was far from being a soothing and comforting presence to Andrews. Yet, within the world Andrews creates in Son of Bird, her mother emerges in a series of contradictions and conflicts as an intriguing, albeit troubled, individual:
My mother froze in mid-air, her eyes glazing into the distance /
that was always there between my parents like a sacred room no /
one else entered. I pictured it as a paperweight full of snow—a tiny /
foreign land where princes and princesses fell asleep but never
woke. Where no one ever kissed or rescued them.
To her credit, Nin Andrews does not shy away from the negatives: her bouts of depression, fascination with suicide, early use of alcohol and marijuana, pinworms, her first period, the slaughter and subsequent dining on her pet bull, the need to bury the many dead kittens deep enough so the dogs don’t dig them up, and more. It all forms a gripping and deeply personal memoir of a unique, talented person.
Bottom line: Son of Bird is an excellent, enjoyable read.
Nin Andrews
Nin Andrews grew up on a farm in Charlottesville, Virginia and received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. She is the author of fifteen poetry collections including The Last Orgasm (2020), Miss August (2017), and Why God is a Woman (2015). She is the recipient of many honors, and her poetry appears in numerous prestigious journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, Agni, The Paris Review, and four editions of Best American Poetry among others.
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