Written in the years after returning home to South Texas, The Bird Church tends to the urban microfauna-the grackles, koi, chicharras, cosmos, feral parrots, snoutnosed butterflies, but also the ornamental fruit and children-which persist in the unsupervised scars of highways and inland refineries. Less a poetry of witness than of attention, The Bird Church considers "what is here": the ordinary life that persists and survives amid the occupations of colonial history and its current climate and political crises.
