What Bird Are You?

Aptos High School alumna Amy Bobeda announces the release of her new book What Bird Are You? with award-winning Finishing Line Press this spring.

Work in this illustrated collection of poetry and essays travels from Sunset Beach across the Valley of Birds, north to Bolinas, and beyond navigating the worlds of clay, mythology, and birds in an increasingly fragile ecosystem, building new stories from the memories of my parents’ lifelong careers teaching in Cabrillo’s ceramics department.

Bobeda is a poet, artist, and teacher, with a master’s degree in creative writing & poetics from Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., where she is the director of the Naropa Writing Center.

“I’ve never seen a bird that hasn’t made me want to live,” Amy Bobeda writes in her second full-length collection of poetry, essays, and playful illustrations.

Sequestered during the 2020 lockdown, some sought the company of Netflix and loved ones or the challenge of baking the perfect bread; Amy Bobeda sought the company of birds.

From local bald eagles to East Coast cardinals, the book is a murmuration of bird songs mapping Ohlone lands of the Pajaro Valley, famous birds of Twitter’s Manhattan Bird Alert, the Acoma Reservation, and daily life in Colorado’s first “Bird City.”

Uncovering childhood memories rooted in her mother’s obsession with sculpting porcelain birds, and a home filled with her father’s radio-control airplanes, Bobeda uncovers her own origin stories carry wings.

This collection of essays and poems explores what it means to live as a writer caught between the world of potters and the world of birds in ecosystems more fragile than unfired porcelain.

Andrew Schelling of The Jack Kerouac School and author of The Facts at Dog Tank Spring gives it a favorable review.

Local readers are sure to appreciate this poem on the storm-battered Cement Ship of Seacliff:

the cement ship, age 10
straddling Seacliff and Rio del Mar
I take my sister’s picture
just before the fenced-off hull, her face
sepia like the pouch of pelicans
pirating the ship behind the fence
my father says when I was a kid we could walk
all the way to the end
I stick my nose in
chain link and enter the picture
in the county fair. For the next decade
when people ask how old is your sister I
say twenty-seven because the way her curls meet
the wind against the cement ship
twenty-seven forever.

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The book costs $20.99 at www.finishinglinepress.com/product/what-bird-are-you-by-amy-bobeda/