Flight Feathers is a collection steeped in remembrance. Avian flight feathers are anchored to bone with ligaments to offer courageous lift of wings.   In a traumatic time of poly crisis and upheaval, Gwendolyn Morgan’s poetry illuminates natural landscapes, brings us to renewed hope.   In a season of transition, we are offered a place to honor our collective grief and gratitude.

WRITERS’ PRAISE FOR FLIGHT FEATHERS

“To open this precious book is to be transported into a realm where time bursts into life, nature reveals itself as family, and the thirst for justice unfolds into joy. “How the wind lifts the bones  the melodies”!  These poems are true gifts of love.” —Annie Finch, Author of Spells: New and Selected Poems

“This new collection of poems and prose by Gwendolyn Morgan, is riddled with dark beauty. Crafted during a time of profound uncertainty, her language is an affectionate offering to loss and love, grief, and gratitude. Complex, warm, intimate, bittersweet, at once achingly beautiful and heartbreaking, Flight Feathers invites us to walk with reverence on holy ground.” — Francis Weller, author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

“Flight Feathers is an important book, essential in time of Covid-19 and climate disaster. It reflects the grieving parts of us all and the sustenance of the natural world like a maternal heartbeat weaving in and out of consciousness. It offers the deep comfort that comes from naming both pain and grace, invokes the “chalice of golden chanterelles” that hold us all. As a poet, she reminds us of deeper rifts, where “spiritual distress smells like sepsis.” She finds, and brings us, a counterpoint to despair in the watershed, the woods where she walks. Flight Feathers is a book I’ll reach for again and again. It is a witness to Covid time, racism, global violence and the red fox in the suburban watershed, a gift to us all.” — Ruby Hansen Murray, columnist for the Osage News

“Ecstatic, meditative, and deeply wise, Gwendolyn Morgan’s Flight Feathers of Gratitude is a clarion call of hope, renewal, and healing based in the sacrality of nature and the lyric tradition.  ‘A grateful heart illuminates the space around it’:  her powerful voice rises above the din of our political, ecological, and apocalyptic crises, as a soothsayer and visionary witness for our times. Just exactly how Gwendolyn Morgan’s dazzling collection Flight Feathers of Gratitude exerts its miraculous power (linguistically, vibrationally) on the reader remains a mystery, as it should; her prophetic vision of our return to a force greater than Anthropogenically-wrought destruction, leaping between lyric, narrative, elegy, ekphrasis, and praise songs, is nothing short of sublime.” —Virginia Konchan, author of Hallelujah Time

“In this fine collection of poetry and short prose, poet Gwendolyn Morgan skillfully juxtaposes extreme times with ordinary observation. Her poems demand we bear unflinching witness to humankind’s inhumanity and suffering. But standing in steadfast opposition to each dirge is the reprieve of dailiness and the poet’s exquisitely rendered evidence of the constancy and beauty of nature (“Each day birds remind me who I am.”). Over and again, Morgan guides us to an awareness of the “wisdom of grief, the gratitude of wood sorrel and salal”. The stolid, unembellished constancy of nature’s presence in these poems, and the simple acts of living and loving, show us the way forward if we would but heed this keen and passionate observer of the best and the worst.” — Ellen Waterston, author of Walking the High Desert