These Hollowed Bones

Tint Journal Review of These Hollowed Bones by Joyce Bou Charaa
Poetry
by Amelia Díaz Ettinger
In, These Hollowed Bones, birds are the conduit for the internal emotions and the environmental changes surrounding the narrator’s voice. This collection ties the themes of loss, marriage, and ecology, both personal and ecological. The voices within these poems speak of the isolation and migration that are both a part of the natural world and the collapse of safety within this world, as well as the author's experiences. These themes are treated in a light pen that doesn’t want to weigh the reader down in this challenging time. Some poems bring the curious side of nature with humor.
 
These Hollowed Bones comprise forty-seven poems written with minimal punctuation. The human voices and names are without capitalization to indicate the lower standing humans have within the body of the work, whereas in the persona poems, the personal ‘I’ is capitalized to indicate the higher standing these species have in our milieu.
Published by: Sea Crow Press, Barnstable, MA
ISBN-13: 978-1961864009
Publication date: April 2, 2024
Cover image: Dale Chaplin
Cover design: Mary Petiet
Trade Paper
5.5" x 8.5"
106 pages
$18.00

Praise for These Hollowed Bones

"These Hollowed Bones is, fittingly, flighted on hope and feathers. Díaz Ettinger flawlessly bridges the perceived divide between us and our winged brethren to uncover worlds of shared intimacy—both within our shared world and ourselves. We have always looked to the sky for answers, found our dreams of flight the most wondrous. In this collection, such wonderment unfolds effortlessly on the page with the poet's sprawling knowledge dovetailed perfectly with an
artist's eye."
—JESSICA MEHTA, author of Constellations of My Body
"In These Hollowed Bones, Ettinger acts as an ornithologist drawing on her astute observations of birds to convey her message. Throughout the collection it is these sharp images and motifs that create an atmosphere of longing whether for a deeper closeness to her mother or an exploration of her heritage. It is Ettinger's encounters with birds that reflect some of our most vulnerable human qualities."
—TAK ERZINGER, poet, winner of the 2021 Whirling Prize, University of Indianapolis
"Within the pages of These Hollowed Bones Amelia Díaz Ettinger has assembled a flock of poems that sing complex and haunting songs of ancestry, migration, ageing, and loss. Set against the backdrop of a world reshaped by climate change and fire, Ettinger's birds bank between metaphor and persona, sometimes standing in for family members and sometimes inhabited by the poet herself. But whether perched in the loneliness of an empty nest or yearning for her home country, like the birds she writes about, Ettinger knows 'that fear flees when there's community'. Ettinger's poems build that community, that 'gifted grace of a murmuration,' through the precise and tender lens of an ornithologist's eye, a poet's eye. These Hollowed Bones is a brilliant 'theater of synchronicity,' a collection the reader can come home to again and again, in any season."
—BRITTANY CORRIGAN, author of Solastalgia

Excerpt from These Hollowed Bones
Towhee

Pipilo erythrophthalamus
for no particular reason
on these walks of mine
my bird is the Towhee —Rufous-Sided to be exact i like her unassuming
dress of brown
with hints of white patches flashing on her tail
as she flies towards a branch but maybe what calls
me to her is her song
chup chup chup seeeeeeeeee such a plain song
a clear song
a celebration song
makes me wonder
how can she be so content in her noisy rummage among dead leaves
that startles me awake?
such a necessary reminder to sing