When Mockingbirds Sing

Katherine Nelson-Born's premiere chapbook, When Mockingbirds Sing, published by Finishing Line Press, is grounded in her New Orleans roots, but her poems soar into unexpected places. When Mockingbirds Sing takes flight out of the ruins of Katrina and Palmyra and celebrates the imagination's triumph over personal as well as global tragedies. Katherine's poetry "sets free from earth's orbit" the ordinary and the extraordinary in words "so clean, so twisted" that you can't help but enjoy her warp-speed wit shooting from the hip while joining her rocket-fueled ride as "cosmic debris/firing across the universe."
In poems that "sing like the Mockingbird" from a "throaty darkness" illuminating a "new dark edged with sparks," Katherine's wordplay makes us "backwards/fly" and rise like "a snowy egret" into the sun, "wings ablaze," exploding above the ruins we create into something "newer than the morning of a day not yet born." Katherine's words "fall/like dogwood petals flowering the ashen earth" and dare us to ask ourselves if art is "worth a life." Read her poems and "bear witness," and if you "feel lost," remember, "the fossils point the way." In these pages, enjoy award-winning poems that have appeared in AlaLit.com, Alyss, Ellipsis, Emerald Coast Review, Excelsior ReView, GSU Review, Maple Leaf Rag and Penumbra