Nightingale is a book about change. This collection radically rewrites and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid's epic, The Metamorphoses, the characters changed not by divine intervention but by both ordinary and extraordinary human events. Nightingale updates many of Ovid's subjects while remaining true to the Roman epic's tropes of violence, dismemberment, silence, and fragmentation. Is change a physical or spiritual act? Does metamorphosis literalize our essential traits, or change us into something utterly new? Nightingale investigates these themes, while considering the roles that pain, violence, art and voicelessness all play in the changeable selves we present to the world.
Winner of the Washington State Book Award
Lannan Literary Selection
Starred Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Library Journal Review
Washington Post "Best Poetry Collection" selection, May
2019
NPR's "Best of 2019" selection
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