Birds to Bones
Writings on Grief, Gender, Mormonism, and Magic
Published by BCC Press, 2023“As it turns out, shoveling dirt over your soul for half your life is suffocating. … There is so much I had to return to and excavate in my adult body. And the creative writing course I took in college, while in the throes of deep depression, turned out to be fertile ground for discovering fossils.
Eventually, I found myself down a rabbit hole, taking my whole identity–and my entire belief system–all the way back to bedrock, ready to reconstruct everything I thought I ever knew. This time, with authenticity and intention.”
—from “An Archaeology of the Soul,” where the author introduces his debut
Reviews
“Birds to Bones is a treasure of meaning and beauty.
The delightful work slides forward with gorgeous facility like an otter, sleek and immersed in what on the surface seems like play, but a closer look reveals the gravity and sorrow of existence in every move. [Rowan’s] writing sparkles with vitality and hope … captur[ing] a joyous curiosity that splashes natural light into the heaviness of the world.
”Don’t miss it—I’m sure you will be as taken with it as I have been.
— Steven L. Peck, author of A Short Stay
in Hell and Heike’s Void
“Aisling Rowan has dipped their quill in the cosmos and written a new song. Utterly iridescent and ringing with love, Birds to Bones is a tender chronicle of a life lived in liminal spaces—grief, gender transition, and faith. With transformative insight, Ash illuminates the earth, self, and the Gods as they go through cycles of becoming.
“This book changed how I see. From hard experience and strata of the soul, Ash unearths geode upon geode, cracks each open, and turns them inside out until the earth glitters with belovedness. Birds to Bones is a soft home where all can sit together and be who they really are.”
— Elizabeth Pinborough, author of
The Brain's Lectionary: Psalms and Observations
“[Rowan] takes essays, art, and poetry and turns them into a cosmological dance. Story is truth, the truth is story, it says, and we are all creatures born of earth, reaching for the sky, attempting to transform. …
“Birds to Bones is story—which is to say truth—steeped in dirt and starlight. Water, air, earth, fire all, all being woven together with words. Meaning isn’t something that’s opaque and unknowable: it’s something that’s made, one bit of matter, one spoken word at a time.”
— Kerry Spencer Pray, editor, I Spoke to You with Silence and The Book of Queer Mormon Joy