Nonbinary Bird of Paradise by Emilia Phillips

Nonbinary Bird of Paradise by Emilia Phillips is a wonderful, fun, thought-provoking collection in three parts, filled with mythology, biblical stories, personal history, and always sounds. The first section is an extended poem in twelve parts in which the biblical Eve is a lesbian, in love with a second woman she created from another of Adam’s ribs. The poems are subversive and beautiful. The second section continues with love poems and lullabies and includes a retelling of Noah and the flood from the perspective of Noah’s wife, who is not completely on board with the plans. The third section contains poems more rooted in a contemporary speaker, someone now tied to the classical history of the book. There are many list poems, in which the sounds pile up gloriously. Phillips isn’t afraid of rhyme, but like the mythologies they use, they subvert them, making them internal to the line. The result both challenges and delights. Buy here.

Book V of “The Queerness of Eve”

Adam never forced

himself on me,

not like you are

thinking. Not like God

forced the trumpet-blooming

world upon us, made

an institution of my dewclaw

loneliness. From it,

I was meant to make

my heart a whale

song sung before whales

legged into the ocean,

a tree planted from an un-

imagined seed. I once

asked God the which

came first question

but he only answered

by taking

out his pencil

eraser to the concept

drawing. He was Adam’s

friend. Not mine.

I had no belly button.

And I never learned the world

by putting it in

my mouth. I was never

a baby in the literal

sense. That’s what made childbirth

so painful after we were sent

packing—the shock

of seeing tiny, potatoed

humans like the ego’s

root. I think God thought

Adam and I would talk

about everything

but what was there

to say

until I had to

make no?

And the rhymes in this passage (there are so many other passages) . . .

From “Daphne, Felled”

The first blow came like an icepick

headache. And the second?

Like a weakness in the knees.

I still remember what it was like

having a human body, a woman’s

body. Full of rage, of honeybees

stinging each fingertip from the inside

out while the drones busied

in my heart, wings scraping

the spongy interior of my lungs

while I ran from that dung-stain

of a god. I lowercase his need . . . .