there was this bird
Possession Sound Poetry Series: Volume 4
In Nikia Chaney’s there was this bird, narrative erupts with a force both musical and visual. With experimental arrangements of text and deep sonic resonance, Chaney affirms herself a virtuoso of transforming stories of identity, marginalization, and race into landscapes at once beautiful and heartbreaking. Part traditional lyric, part dynamic geometric proof, the book invites readers into a concrete collaborative experience. “I want to tell you a story,” Chaney writes, and that story is a sweeping exploration of what it means to be a person of color in today’s America. “every story is the same: you trying to erase what I am.” Chaney counters each erasure by pushing imagination to the edge of the page—quite literally—where words swarm and reform, not unlike watching a flock of starlings move through evening skies. there was this bird turns stone, pebble, lake, and person into a new landscape—one of possibility, of visual art, of song.
Praise for there was this bird
makalani bandele, author of (jopappy & the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk
Nikia Chaney’s there was this bird has held court and sway in my poetic imagination and sensibilities since I first set
my mind to it. ATTENTION: Nikia Chaney interrupts your regularly scheduled programming to introduce you to linguistic, syntactical, and formal experimentations for your inspiration and information. . . . For goddess’s sake and with all haste, get this book for its building blocks of poetic futures.
tim seibles, author of Voodoo Libretto
Nikia Chaney’s there was this bird is a collection grounded in sharp and mind-bending perceptions.
These poems affirm the primacy of the restless, radical imagination. . . . Reading Nikia Chaney’s new book will
stop you, sit you down, and wake you up.
anastacia-renée, author of
there was this bird chirps with intimate, layered, and thick language as wing and experimental art as beak—every poem at its own towering height of flight.
Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere
Nikia Chaney is a multigenre author and visual artist. She has published two poetry books, To Stir & (Word Works, 2022) and us mouth (University of Hell Press, 2018); a memoir, Ladybug (Indlandia, 2022); and a short volume of science fiction, Three Walking (Bamboo Dart, 2021). She has serves as Inlandia Literary Laureate (2016–2018). In 2023, she won a California Arts Council Established Artist Individual Fellowship. She teaches in Santa Cruz.
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