If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting

In this debut collection, Anna Journey invites the reader into her peculiar, noir universe nourished with sex and mortality. Her poems are haunted by demons, ghosts, and even the living who wander exotic landscapes that appear at once threatening and seductive. In these poems, her sly speaker renames a pink hibiscus on display at Lowe's, "Lucifer's Panties"; another character chants, "I'd fall devil / over heels over edge over oleander"; and one woman writes a letter to the underworld:Dear black bayou, once, by a riverI bit a man's neck. His scent: the rawteak air husked inside stomachs of sixRussian nesting dolls--the ones in the attic I pulledapart and open. The ones Ipulled apart and open like Styrofoam cups.

Anna Journey is currently a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston and a poetry editor for Gulf Coast. Her poems have been published in a number of journals, including American Poetry Review, FIELD, and Kenyon Review, and her essays have appeared in Blackbird, Notes on Contemporary Literature, and Parnassus. In 2006, Journey discovered the unpublished status of Sylvia Plath's early sonnet "Ennui" and the influence of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby on it.