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January 16, 2024
9780813198675
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January 16, 2024
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9780813198675
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9780813198682
English
104
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v2.1 Reference
Electronic book text
January 16, 2024
9780813198699
9780813198675
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104
8.50 Inches (US)
5.50 Inches (US)
$29.95 USD, £27.00 GBP
v2.1 Reference

Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House

Poems

The fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s ushered in a new tide of European immigrants to the United States. These populations, which hailed primarily from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, were largely adrift in America's cultural melting pot. Laden with their belongings and informed by their experiences, these immigrants became citizens of a new diaspora searching for space to exist in their adopted home.

In Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House, author Katerina Stoykova follows that which "calls / the roaming mind / looking for land" with the shell of her homeland at her back. Through themes of domestic abuse, the death of a parent, the loss of a friend, and the search for cultural identity, the poems in this collection transcend the borders of language and nation-states. As a Bulgarian immigrant, Stoykova weighs the differences between safety and captivity, exploring how one can feel sheltered yet still not feel at home.

Through a series of addresses to her new domestic partner, America, the speaker in this collection expresses gratitude while simultaneously interrogating the landscape that has come to "home" her. With every line of verse, Stoykova's unique grasp on the turns of the English language brings a fresh perspective to immigrant identity and lays bare the terrifying and thrilling duality of living between two cultures.

About the Author

Katerina Stoykova is an author, editor, teacher, and translator from Bulgaria. She immigrated to the United States in 1995, publishing several poetry books in English and Bulgarian since her arrival. Her book Second Skin was awarded a grant from the European Commission to be translated and published in English. In 2010 she launched an independent literary press, Accents Publishing.

Reviews

"These poems probe the precincts of the heart, illuminating a self whose experiences mirror our own unspoken selves. Practicing ruthless honesty and boldness during this psychic journey, Katerina Stoykova generates emotional intensity through an unsparing dialogue with the self. She writes her way to truth, as one of her mentors instructed. These taut poems document the immigrant experience in an address to America that also affirms that each of us is an immigrant as we cross borders of love and self- appraisal to map our own boundaries. True to one of this collection's central images of itinerant birds and imaginative flight, these poems "perch on your palm and home there."—Richard Taylor, author of Elkhorn: Evolution of a Kentucky Landscape
University Press of Kentucky

9780813198675 : between-a-bird-cage-and-a-bird-house-stoykova
Hardback
January 16, 2024
$29.95 USD
9780813198705 : between-a-bird-cage-and-a-bird-house-stoykova
Electronic book text
January 16, 2024
$19.95 USD
9780813198682 : between-a-bird-cage-and-a-bird-house-stoykova
Paperback / softback
January 16, 2024
$19.95 USD
9780813198699 : between-a-bird-cage-and-a-bird-house-stoykova
Electronic book text
January 16, 2024
$29.95 USD

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