Murmurations is a collection of love poems that explores how intimacy tests the capacity of language–how music is also noise and the prospect for miscommunication abounds. Populating her poems with birdsong and murmurings of the natural world, MacAskill highlights how poets and lovers share much with birders on the twitch, how even keen observation and intense passion can fail us as we pursue our beloved across distances and through time. Yet when we do finally find love it often seems, like a rare bird, “at once / singular and improbable / because of how clearly it appeared to us.”

Annick MacAskill is the author of a chapbook entitled Brotherly Love: Poems of Sappho and Charaxos (2016). Her poems have appeared in journals such as Grain, Prism International, Versal, Room Magazine, The Fiddlehead, and Arc. She has been selected as a finalist for the CBC Canada Writes Poetry Prize, the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. Originally from Ontario, she currently lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

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