Review of When We Were Birds

Geez. This review. Kind, wise, a poem in its own right. Thanks, Melissa Mylchreest.

Joe Wilkins’ words unspool down the page like the highway runs off forever into the empty spaces of Montana’s Big Dry, the eastern reaches of the state where he was born and raised. Populated by chokecherry, dry riverbeds, overgrown roadside ditches, lean cattle and leaner people, his books—poetry, nonfiction and fiction—all speak of a world that is scarred, broken, damaged and dusty, but never irredeemable and never without beauty.