Written by: Charlotte Ungar
In a poetry landscape often dominated by academic opacity or over-wrought lyricism, Hera Lindsay Bird’s work arrives with an emotional immediacy that will make you rethink the requirements to make a poem matter—not through formal precision or metaphorical restraint, but through the sheer force of unfiltered feeling. Her lines are bold and often profane, yet they carry an unmistakable sincerity that lingers longer than delicately wrought verse. Through this Bird reminds us that sometimes, all a poem needs is to say exactly what it means, without apology.
What’s striking, however, is that this clarity doesn’t come at the expense of depth. In fact, it’s the mechanism through which Bird constructs a complex interiority, built from unresolved edges. “I am so in love with you I want to lie down in the middle of a public intersection and cry” is just one of her many cathartic and irreverent beginnings to poems that will stay with you for days on end. And how could her words not linger? Each line instills an apparent trust in the reader, which you begin not only to profoundly realize, but cherish. Bird’s relationship with risk is impressive and foundational to her poetic voice; she never sacrifices the integrity of the poem to appease any former standard of purpose.
In the midst of so much careful intensity lies Bird’s quiet mastery of poetic pace. Her language unspools in long, breathless passages—rife with digression, interruption, and pop-cultural debris (meme culture, Lana Del Rey, superheroes, and poetic lineages)—before arriving, almost imperceptibly, at moments of startling emotional lucidity. In “Having Sex in a Field in 2013,” for instance, what begins as a blunt recollection of a New Year’s hookup quickly shifts into a sensuous image of wind moving through tall grass—a gesture that feels less like metaphor and more like emotional displacement.
Consider the line from “Keats Is Dead So Fuck Me From Behind”: “I’m sorry I wrote you all those terrible poems / but I was in love and I wanted to own it.” Bird’s sentiment crescendos with the added line of “I wanted to own it,” alluding to an inner desire to control something as shared as love. And hasn’t everyone, at some point, clung to the notion of control in what is meant to be shared? Because love unravels both of these systems at once, which Bird believes leads poets to turn to writing as a sort of last hope of self-preservation.
This is Bird’s maximalism—the architecture of her language built from the erotic, without being overly indulgent. Her rhythm never falls even during extreme pivots and references. One poem that comes to mind is “Pyramid Scheme,” which begins with a playful musing about the conception of a pyramid scheme and capitalist society, then lassoses a lover into the mix. Money, crooked business, and the language of economy richly parallel Bird’s distinctly humorous, confessional verse: I know you hate the domestic in poetry but you should have thought of that before you invited me to move in with you.
A defining point in Bird’s writing is her remarkable ability to refine chaos with poetic license, instead of compressing or resolving it. The result is a tone that is strictly hers—that feels less constructed than inhabited—where disorder becomes not a flaw in logic, but a feature of lived experience at its most sincerely human. This is the quiet radicalism of Bird’s work: the insistence that emotional transparency, often derided as naïveté, can be the most sophisticated gesture a poet makes.
Featured Image Caption: A photo of Hera Lindsay Bird
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