Catbird

“Julia Davis’s Catbird is a lyric meditation on a wounded world, one where some of us are safe while horror and war ravage innocent women and children in a distant land. But are we safe? The narrator knows too keenly, and feels too sharply, to believe that we are. Davis writes viscerally and from the heart.” —Dinty W. Moore, author of The Mindful Writer

“Julia Davis’s Catbird is an urgent, meaningful meditation on war, power, and fragility of the world. It’s 2022 and the invasion of Ukraine has begun. From her place of relative safety, Eve reads of the bombings, the fleeing families and abandoned crops as she ponders the corrupt desire for absolute power and fears she is witnessing the beginnings of World War III. Woven throughout this witnessing are images of the birds she watches in the trees around her house, making tangible the fragility we share in this time when the possibility of invasion threatens us all.”—Karen Osborn, author of Centerville, Patchwork (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Between Earth and Sky, and The River Road

“As a woman of color cheering for those who wish to survive any and all wars against us I hope you read this book with the fear yet compassion it shares."—Nikki Giovanni, New York Times best-selling and Emmy-award nominated author of Bicycles: Love Poems (2009), The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection (2004), and Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose (2020)