Natalie Easton (Spoken Label, January 2023)

Latest up from Spoken Label (Poetry / Spoken Word Podcast) features the wonderful Natalie Easton author off “I’ll buy you a bird instead”.

Natalie Easton’s poems have appeared in such publications as Jet Fuel Review, Superstition Review, and tinywords. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2014, and was a contributor at Bread Loaf in 2015. Her debut chapbook, I’ll Buy You a Bird Instead, is was releeased on Femme Salve Books on November 9th 2022.

“I’ll buy you a bird instead” is described as “In this intimate chapbook of poems, Natalie Easton examines the complexity of her relationship with her mother through a kaleidoscope of loss, grief, and love. The troubles of childhood are reexamined in adulthood, brought out and looked at with a new depth of understanding. This is a book that encourages the reader to look harder at the difficult moments, and find the gems hidden there.”
Some praise for “I’ll buy you a bird instead”:
“I’ll Buy You a Bird Instead is a complex cry of longing – from a ‘throat veined white like a cut strawberry’ – for the ever-disappearing mother. These poems are painted in the many colors of illness, healing, resentment, surprising humor, regret: ‘Go in, I will my former self. / Just for a glass of water.’ From caring for the parent in extremis (‘If you weren’t conscious in an hour, / then I should make a call’) to tending her body after death (‘For all I knew you felt it still’), from denial (‘I have tried to escape without / burying you’) to acceptance (‘Now that I’m alone I know / you’ll never stop returning to me’), Easton brings a mother-daughter relationship – both foundational and impossible – into razor-edge focus, side-by-side with its loss. Easton’s eye is unflinching, her portrayal of grief unstinting. The red bird glowing behind these poems – the parrot itself and the mother’s devotion, even mixed with betrayal – is a reminder that love can wreck us and still we can be ‘filled – like an urn – with its beauty.’”
—Laura Cherry, author of Haunts (Cooper Dillon Books)
“In forthright and gutting language, this collection looks resolutely at the ways in which we communicate with our past in mourning. This is a beautiful book that will break your heart.”
—Erin Elizabeth Smith, author of DOWN

“…these fierce and tender poems affirm that at the end of pain, what remains is wisdom. What remains is love.”
—Angela Narciso Torres, author of What Happens Is Neither

More about Natalie can be found here - www.natalieeastonpoetry.com

The book is available through femme salve books directly here -
femmesalvebooks.net/bird-instead-by-natalie-easton/