The Maybe-Bird

"The Maybe-Bird is a beautiful net cast in the hope to retrieve, and a wonderful net to get caught in as a reader." -Burgi Zenhaeusern, River Mouth Review

The Maybe-Bird cements Jennifer Elise Foerster as a visionary voice in contemporary poetry. Through a spiraling sequence of lyric poems, a cast of voices-oracles, ghosts, water-speaks to a long history of genocide, displacement and ecological devastation. Foerster uses new poetic forms and a highly conceptual framework to build these poems from myth, memory and historical document, resurfacing Mvskoke language and story on the palimpsest of Southeastern US history. Foerster leads us on a journey through the visible and invisible landscapes of our human story, through what feels like multiple lifetimes, where we hear the language of the shifting weather and stand on the haunted edge of the world.
Jennifer Elise Foerster received her PhD in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver and her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Foerster is the author of Leaving Tulsa (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018), both published by the University of Arizona Press. Foerster is of European and Mvskoke descent, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. She lives in San Francisco.

“The Maybe-Bird is a beautiful net cast in the hope to retrieve, and a wonderful net to get caught in as a reader.” —Burgi Zenhaeusern, River Mouth Review

The Maybe-Bird cements Jennifer Elise Foerster as a visionary voice in contemporary poetry. Through a spiraling sequence of lyric poems, a cast of voices—oracles, ghosts, water—speaks to a long history of genocide, displacement and ecological devastation. Foerster uses new poetic forms and a highly conceptual framework to build these poems from myth, memory and historical document, resurfacing Mvskoke language and story on the palimpsest of Southeastern US history. Foerster leads us on a journey through the visible and invisible landscapes of our human story, through what feels like multiple lifetimes, where we hear the language of the shifting weather and stand on the haunted edge of the world.
Jennifer Elise Foerster received her PhD in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver and her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Foerster is the author of Leaving Tulsa (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018), both published by the University of Arizona Press. Foerster is of European and Mvskoke descent, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. She lives in San Francisco.