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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer K. Sweeney

The recipient of the 2009 James Laughlin Award for How to Live on Bread and Music (Perugia Press, 2009), Jennifer K. Sweeney received the 2006 Main Street Rag Poetry Award for her debut collection Salt Memory (Main Street Rag Books). Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Sweeney serves as assistant editor for DMQ Review and currently lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her husband, poet Chad Sweeney.


	FURTHER READING


		Poems by Jennifer K. Sweeney
		Fragments for the End of the Year

		How to Make a Game of Waiting

		How to Uproot a Tree


		Related Poems
		How to Uproot a Tree by Jennifer K. Sweeney

		Door in the Mountain by Jean Valentine

		The Girl I Call Alma by Linda Gregg

		The Weight by Linda Gregg

		White by J. Michael Martinez

		Xicano by J. Michael Martinez

		[Hiking up Topanga Canyon] by Harryette Mullen

		[My Visitor from Nebraska] by Harryette Mullen

		[Toward the empty earth] by Osip Mandelstam


		Poems about Birds
		Tender Buttons [Chicken] by Gertrude Stein

		Littlefoot, 19, [This is the bird hour] by Charles Wright

		The Scarlet Ibis, Section VII by Susan Hahn

		A Bird came down the Walk (328) by Emily Dickinson

		Birdcall by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

		Birds Again by Jim Harrison

		Birds Appearing In A Dream by Michael Collier

		Darwin's Finches by Deborah Digges

		Evening Hawk by Robert Penn Warren

		Home to Roost by Kay Ryan

		Hope is the thing with feathers (254) by Emily Dickinson

		Hummingbird by Elaine Terranova

		I am Like a Desert Owl, an Owl Among the Ruins by Noelle Kocot

		If the Owl Calls Again by John Haines

		Last Night I Dreamed of Chickens by Jack Prelutsky

		Leda and the Swan by W. B. Yeats

		Leda, After the Swan by Carl Phillips

		Let Birds by Linda Gregg

		My Mother Would Be a Falconress by Robert Duncan

		Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats

		Poet as Immortal Bird by Ron Padgett

		Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar

		The Blue by David Baker

		The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

		The Eagle by Lord Alfred Tennyson

		The Heron by Linda Hogan

		The Parakeets by Alberto Blanco

		The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

		The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

		The Starlings by Jesper Svenbro

		The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins

		The Yellow Bittern (An Bunnan Bui) by Cathal Bui Mac Giolla Gunna, read by James Wright

		Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens

		To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley

		To a Waterfowl by William Cullen Bryant


		Related Prose
		Thirteen Ways of Looking: Poems About Birds

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In Flight
by Jennifer K. Sweeney


The Himalayan legend says there are beautiful white birds that live completely in flight. They are born in the air, must learn to fly before falling and die also in their flying. Maybe you have been born into such a life with the bottom dropping out. Maybe gravity is claiming you and you feel ghost-scripted. For the one who lives inside the fall, the sky beneath the sky of all.
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Audio Clip
Oct. 16, 2009 Tischman Auditorium, New York City From the Academy Audio Archive
Copyright © 2009 by Jennifer K. Sweeney. Reprinted from How to Live on Bread and Music, with the permission of Perugia Press, www.perugiapress.com, Florence, Massachusetts.

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