Son of a Bird by Nin Andrews

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Son of a Bird: A Memoir in Prose Poems

by Nin Andrews

Etruscan Press, 2025

reviewed by Bethany Reid

A long time ago, when my daughters were very young and I was juggling childcare and my first full-time teaching gig, and trying to give up my crazy notion to be a poet, someone gave me a copy of Nin Andrews’ 2001 poetry book, Why They Grow Wings.

That summer I began what I called my “one bad poem” challenge, which was what people nowadays call “The Stafford Challenge”; in short, it required lowering my standards and writing something that resembled a poem every day. I did this for five years. I often turned to other poets for inspiration, and Why They Grow Wings was at the top of the stack, with the result that wings turned up a bunch, especially during that first year. Like feathers piling up in a chicken house corner, for a long time my poems didn’t look like much. And then they did. (I won’t say they stood up and took the shape of an angel, though Andrews would.)

            So, when the publisher of Nin Andrews’ newest book, Son of a Bird, reached out to me for a review, I took a quick look, and thought, Oh, it’s set on a farm—I grew up on a farm, and it’s Nin Andrews! I pushed aside several other projects and said yes.

“Once upon a time,” we read early in Son of a Bird: “there was a girl who didn’t want to be born. She was the last daughter of a gay man and an autistic woman.” It’s less fairy tale than it is Flannery O’Connor’s Southern grotesque (including a man’s artificial arm). Set in Virginia, the book is an autobiographical collection of 6 chapters divided into 106 pieces. It begins with a prosy poem titled “Dear Past Self,” and continues in prose with some reporting, some fragments, many pieces bordering on poetry, some prose poems, all encompassing a childhood radically different from my own. A peculiar farm and a peculiar family, eccentric and alarming. A father who mixes a whiskey sour for his four-year-old daughter; a mother who reads aloud from The Odyssey and can’t bear to be touched; older siblings with their own dramas; farm hands and a beloved nanny who come and go, casting large shadows across the stage. Death is a character here, too, and death’s shadow—“a crow’s head and wings…taller than daddy,” is the largest of all.

It’s easy to pluck out the ugly bits—the dead cats, the pet bull served up as steak, the suicidal girl—but there’s beauty here, too, and saving grace. This passage is one of several about Miss Mary, the nanny who died when Andrews was five years old:

Miss Mary wasn’t just a nanny. She was a cook, a laundress, a housekeeper, a savior, a saint. I needed her then, even after she passed. Miss Mary was my protector, mother, first love, goddess. I felt her like a song, a longing, an ache. I kept her close as a breath. Even now, when I sit down to write in the morning, I ask Miss Mary how she is. Miss Mary says what she always said, “I’m blessed, Child. I bless you, too.” It’s a little ritual we do. 

I have been told that for a child to grow up to be resilient, they need one person who sees them and believes in them. Luckily for her readers, Andrews—or this cross-eyed, tow-headed little girl who we assume becomes the poet—had Miss Mary. And of course she falls in love with words: “the letters became words became meaning. Like hay bales, I could move them around to build a fort, or a house with windows and doors”.

Once she announces her intention to be a writer, her parents tell her over and over, “Whatever you do…don’t tell”. But Andrews does tell. In college writing comes close to being her undoing, a habit “of keeping a book inside [her] chest”:

—an illustrated text, complete with drawings, photos, fantasies, memories, poems, old letters, but no one has ever read it. (I suspect everyone has one, that they’re common as prayerbooks left in churches with black moleskin covers.) In dreams I find myself turning the pages, folding the corners, underlining passages. I can still see it in the mirror when I wake up, but of course all the words are backwards.

As I read this remarkable memoir, I kept thinking of that Flannery O’Connor passage from Mystery and Manners: “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” I also thought of this line from O’Connor: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

On the other hand, sometimes telling the truth is what gives us the wings to fly the hell away.

You don’t tell them how you aged one hundred years in a single night when you tried to give up your story, a tale with no heart, a house full of empty rooms, windows swollen shut, the scent of lemon Endust and loneliness, a cross-eyed girl you never liked, a mind you lost her inside. 

How lucky that Nin Andrews had the stomach to go back into her childhood and retrieve that girl for herself, and for us. How lucky to have Son of a Bird fall into my hands.

Bethany Reid’s latest book of poetry, The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm was published on January 1st of this year. Her other books of poetry, include Sparrow, which won the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize, and Body My House (2018).  Her poems, essays, and short stories have recently appeared in One Art, Passengers, Persimmon Tree, Constellations, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, The Thing with Feathers, was published in 2020 as part of Triple No. 10 by Ravenna Press. Bethany and her husband live in Edmonds, Washington, near their three grown daughters; she  blogs about writing and life at http://www.bethanyareid.com .

Get Son of a Bird at Etruscus Press (a link will take you to Bookshop.org)

interview with Nin Andrews about Son of a Bird at The Mackinaw

read Nin Andrews poetry at Escape Into Life