Books & Writing
Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal
Designed as a turn of the century women’s magazine that combines memoir, history, theory, poetry, and image, Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal explores women’s complex relationship with birds through the history of feather fashion. Originating in the bird-hat controversy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which coincided with both the women’s suffrage and budding American conservation movements, this polyvocal book moves in multiple directions as it examines cases of women and birds from across cultures and time periods, from the Virgin Mary, to Leda, Swan Lake, and Alexander McQueen. As its connective thread, Feathers also follows one woman’s enculturation into the world of bird-women and its inherent violence. What might we learn about gender from the birds?
Winner, Essay Press Book Prize, Essay Press 2024.
Best Bones
Winner, Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize
University of Pittsburgh Press 2014
“An absolute must-read… Thought-provoking, riveting, and haunting.” - Mid-American Review
The Creation Museum
Harbor Editions 2022
“Nordgren is a poet of precision and lush language in whose work dreams and the scientific imagination collide.”
- Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
Darwin’s Mother
Finalist, Ohioana Book Award
University of Pittsburgh Press 2017
“This striking and inventive second collection…reads as if a naturalist’s observational notebooks found a second, wondrous life as poetry.” - Publisher’s Weekly
Praise for Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal
“Stunningly original and edging on mischief, Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal undoes the myth of beauty and finds at its center a seed from which monsters might grow. Sarah Rose Nordgren has reimagined the book form to give it a thrilling new purpose.”
— Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily“Guided by historic illustrations and lit with a voice that is speculative, agile, and witty, Feathers traces an ecofeminist argument from its forgotten past into a future made possible through collective memory.”
— Sarah Minor, author of Carousel“A contrast of fanciful and rebellious attitudes weave in and out of various modes: diaries, nonfiction, short stories, poetry, & illustration. Themes of the personal, historical, and political entangle within a poetics collected as a curio cabinet of language and image.”
— Franny Capone, artist and author of Weaving LanguageSelected Writings
Poetry
“Winter” (Memorious)
“On Stillness” (Blackbird)
“Darwin’s Mother (I, II, III)” (The Adroit Journal)
“Material” (Narrative)
“The Performance” (PBS Newshour)
Essay
"The Everlasting Universe of Things” (Agni)
“You Are Not the Choir” (Agni)
Wilderment (Substack newsletter)
“On the Fabric of the Body” (Kenyon Review)
“Anatomy of a Swan” (Atticus Review)
Interview
The INDY- On The School for Living Futures
Mentor & Muse - On Tomas Tranströmer, image & abstraction in poetry
Yale Radio (audio) - On The Creation Museum
Essay Daily - On Smart Snow
PBS Newshour - On Best Bones