Mid-Flight Birder (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798901468760)

At the heart of Mia Schilling Grogan's musical, nuanced, and carefully wrought poetry is a deep longing for a voice outside the self. While translating the words of the great Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, Grogan finds herself dissatisfied with rendering mere language on the page and the images of nature. "Gabriela, it is not enough," she writes in a poem. "I want to hear you." At the same time, this poet seeks, and often finds, a powerful spirituality in everyday life - during a ride on a commuter train, for example, a concert in a park, or a long lunch in the kitchen with a friend. In poem after poem in this radiant book, Mia Schilling Grogan reveals "the beauty always lurking in the common of our days."

-David M. Katz, author, The Biographer

Mia Grogan's beautifully crafted Mid-Flight Birder brims full of watchfulness and mystery. As she puts it, "when we bless the bread / and wine, we are at table in an upper / room." Our parents, long gone, still hold us close. Song and fear, wrapped in memory, connect past and present. Called "to unknot it all," the poet examines her overlapping roles of teacher, scholar, parent, daughter, sibling, and spouse across decades, observing wryly, in retrospect, that she has often been drawn to "[think] about birds / and faith." She declares what we seek most is "the circle that contains / everyone, lost and found." In this way, these poems gift us prayer, "tender care," and an "abundance of solace, / bread and love."

-Marjorie Maddox, author, Seeing Things