by Kaja Weeks (Author), Michael Huang (Photographer), Shawn Aveningo Sanders (Editor)
Mouth Quill's twenty-one poems narrate an intimate journey of universal themes-of ancestors, displacement, migration, longing, and connection. Drawn from the author's childhood familiarity with ancient poems of her heritage, the collection's title, "mouth quill," is inspired by Finno-Ugric runic verse and refers to the "singer's magical tool." The work unearths many such poetic concepts, creating organic metaphoric connections from the distant past to present; occasionally, the reader is invited into magical realism: becoming "the spirit of an egg, carried by the sea to Iberia" before plummeting below the Baltic Ice Lake to find the "land mother will call home." Other poems display tragedies of history (war and displacement) and the effect of ancient world views-cataclysms, music and sacred nature-upon the author's childhood and present in the 21st century, completing a tightly knit, lyrical arc of identity.