The Sin of Feeding Wild Birds

Logan Garner writes his home alive. The gentleness with which he observes and touches life resounds. Each poem becomes “a proportion and part of the fallen whole.”

— Elisa Carlsen, author of Cormorant

The Sin of Feeding Wild Birds is filled with huckleberries, bats, barn swallows, flowers, fish, frogs. The “I” of the poem speaker finds itself through observation of what is all around: the living and the dying, and the things that live through soil. Even dirt becomes a bath! And human relationships unfold on landscapes of literature and longing. If there’s a god in this collection, it’s found in germination: “They grow from the dead, you know —“

Pádraig Ó Tuama, author of 44 Poems on Being with Each Other

Reverent, full of forest shadows and sea mist, these poems ache with a searching, committed love. The Sin of Feeding Wild Birds is an essential praise-record of the Oregon Coast’s boundless beauty and how luminous we can become when we give ourselves over to it. Logan Garner’s debut collection had me dancing and singing by the wood stove.

-Cliff Taylor, author of Notes of An Indigenous Futurist