paper • 80 pages • 17.95
ISBN: 978-1-961897-02-1
eISBN: 978-1-961897-03-8
September 2024 • Poetry
Regally bearing its Latin title, Rara Avis captures in sparse, moving verse both the splendor and the loneliness of what it means to be exceptional — a rarified specimen, a strange bird. A son, a husband, and now a father, seasoned poet Blas Falconer explores the relationships among men — between peers, lovers, parents and children — to consider and question existing models of authority and power. Falconer’s lucid but feeling gaze reveals social complexities with searing and graceful imagery, asking what it means to live outside the heteronormative experience while existing as a man, simultaneously a casualty and a participant in the project of masculinity.
These poems carefully delineate the casual cruelties of queer youth and the beautiful and bitter revelations of adulthood. The wisdom propelling Rara Avis is the knowledge that we are each of us that rare bird; we share our singularity. Everyone has a pancreas, but only one organ matters when Falconer learns his father’s is afflicted. Alchemized by love, one thing, unlike any other, becomes all things. “All day, everything, / no matter how / small, makes me // think of it…The bee / crawling in / blossoms // scattered on / the glass / tabletop. The sound of // a pitcher fill- / ing slowly / with water.”
Rara Avis
A falcon, one of millions raised
for sacrifice. An X-ray
reveals the bird, un-tombed,
wrapped in linen, wings pressed
the length of its ghostly body.
Force-fed mice, sparrows, it couldn’t
expel the bones, the claws,
and died having eaten too much,
the stomach packed: feather and
fur, tail descending the throat.
One of many bred to brave
the dark with its king, beyond
appetite, nothing left
to crave, thus, heavenly, saved.
Rara Avis’s keenest ace is its clear-eyed focus on family care and dissonance and on the eureka of generational love and forgiveness. Falconer, the pioneering queer father of adopted sons, resists showiness and controversy by employing telltale silence and the sturdiness of longstanding but still expressive modes and forms— couplets, cento, ekphrasis. In these supple, affecting poems, Falconer averts predictability and dwells (and even heals) instead in the kingdom of epiphanic memory, of nuance and caesura—poetry’s kingdom.
In these exquisite and musical poems, Falconer seeks answers to the abiding question of who we are and what could have been. Beautiful meditations on fatherhood, the complications of our pasts, and the urgent present reach to us with outstretched arms. In poem after poem, we feel the light touch of a hand on our backs reminding us that we must slowly rise and greet what lies ahead, though the music of the past beckons us to linger. Falconer’s tender and wise poems are gentle reminders that we move forward because we are called to those we love. We move forward because we see in the periphery, the past still holds us in its care.
Blas Falconer could teach a master class on lyric subtext. Rara Avis’s precise, wrenching poems are all about the layering of what is said and unsaid; the strata that form of wound, scar, skin. “When I look / in the rearview, he turns toward peaks // in the distance,” observes a speaker of his newly sullen son, “and when I ask him / to explain, shaking his head, he sighs as if // it isn’t worth the trouble.” Falconer’s handling of boyhood, fathering, love, and masculinity in these pages is startling in its revelations and deeply necessary in its grief. I’ll be thinking about this collection for years to come.