In the hands of Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios, the raven becomes a trickster, witness, executioner and muse, shifting its wings between beauty and loss, life and what comes after, in this beautifully tragic poetry collection.
Across five thematically interconnected sections – Duets, Inscrutable Rascal, Harbingers, Wicked Priests, and Sly Creatures – the raven inhabits many forms. In the forests of California, it calls above the scent of pine and sea-salt air. In biblical and Norse retellings, it becomes Bathsheba’s cunning eye, Noah’s restless scout, a messenger whispering secrets directly into Odin’s ear. In the wake of personal loss, it’s both a mourner and a muse, sometimes a shadow stitched into the poet’s own heart.

Kirkpatrick-Vrenios has filled the poetry with instinctive sensory intensity: “yellow poppies unwrap their skirts to a fat bumblebee,” “the sky lit with clementine and fuchsia,” “the infinite night sky tasting like sweet plump mulberries.” But beauty here is never free of shadow. Fires raze red towns as the oceans choke with smoke. The raven perches on the edge of life and death, carrying news from both sides.

But grief is not the only current; desire, survival, rebellion, and transformation also beautifully grace these pages. The raven taunts, seduces, and consoles; it cannot keep secrets, yet it knows all endings. It moves through apocalypse and myth, through salt marsh and city street, through the poet’s memory and the reader’s breath.

In language that is at once lush and precise, Kirkpatrick-Vrenios gathers folklore, personal elegy, and the fierce flow of the natural world into a single wingbeat. This book invites readers to see as the raven sees: hungry for beauty, undaunted by loss, and alive to the moment before it flies away.

(rā′vən) is not a book to read straight through; it is a collection that you take in bit by bit. One page may pull you into a biblical tent, the next one into a California highway lined with vineyards where ravens turn on the wind like black knives. It moves in fragments, in bursts, the way memory arrives: out of order, but exact in detail.