there was this bird #4 (PB) (2025)

In Nikia Chaney's there was this bird, narrative erupts with a force both musical and visual. With experimental arrangements of text and deep sonic resonance, Chaney affirms herself a virtuoso of transforming stories of identity, marginalization, and race into landscapes at once beautiful and heartbreaking. Part traditional lyric, part dynamic geometric proof, the book invites readers into a concrete collaborative experience. "I want to tell you a story," Chaney writes, and that story is a sweeping exploration of what it means to be a person of color in today's America. "every story is the same: you trying to erase what I am." Chaney counters each erasure by pushing imagination to the edge of the page-quite literally-where words swarm and reform, not unlike watching a flock of starlings move through evening skies. there was this bird turns stone, pebble, lake, and person into a new landscape-one of possibility, of visual art, of song.