Gibson’s previous book Opinel, starts and ends on the image of a workaday knife used by shepherds, peasants, and artists, using her sensitive and critical eye to explore family, culture, nature, and the world we inhabit. In Girl as Birch, Gibson turns her attention to the experience of growing up as a girl in the United States, coming of age while pushing against expectations for what a girl should be. The title poem uses the image of a birch tree to describe the pressure to bend to what others want:
Rebecca Kaiser Gibson is the author of Opinel (Bauhan Publishing, 2015) and two chapbooks, Admit the Peacock and Inside the Exhibition. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, The Heinrich Böll Cottage in Ireland, and the 2008 Fellowship in Poetry, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and was selected as a Fulbright Scholar to teach poetry in Hyderabad, India, in 2011. She is founder and director of The Loom, Poetry in Harrisville, a poetry reading series. Her poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal; Agni; Field; The Greensboro Review; Green Mountain Review; The Harvard Review; The Massachusetts Review; Ocean State Review; Salamander; Slate; and been featured in VerseDaily. Rebecca lives in Marlborough, New Hampshire, and taught poetry at Tufts University for twenty-three years.
Praise for Girl as Birch: “Rebecca Kaiser Gibson’s Girl as Birch is a wonder of lyric compression and subtle music. At times deeply personal, at times nearly mythic, these poems meditate on the complexities of memory and mortality, the fact of the female body, and the lessons of the natural world, cultivated and wild. These are beautiful poems and I’ll return to them with great pleasure.” ––Kevin Prufer, author of The Art of Fiction
