Learning from Linda Bierds

Linda Bierds' poetry makes you feel smarter upon reading it. The night of Gods and Monsters, after BloodHag's lit metal tore the cover off my ear drums (in a good way, of course...), I had trouble keeping up with the content of Bierds' poems and instead relished the language. Words like "Bombyxian" and "thoractic" and phrases like "gull-wing sleeves" and "shriveled larvae peppered the lip-cast industry" coaxed me into her worlds of enthusiasm, Pasteur, moths and war. And now, after reading the poems myself a few times, I have even more appreciation for Bierds' knack of turning history into poetry, if only all of our annals were documented in verse.

Here is a stanza from "Enthusiasm":

It was a time of cheap bread and parties,
grand public works and conspiracies. He quickened,
looked out at the palace trees, enthusiasm for the words—
and works—rising within him: the tireless heads
that spat the silk or cinched the empiry. He felt it,
there on the palace balcony, the god within,
the god who loped through the huntsmen’s hounds
or gasped in the Empress’s throat
as she bent to his microscope’s eyepiece
and saw within not the god but the world,
its spores and languid flagellates.

Read the entire poem and Bierds' other poems from Gods and Monsters HERE.

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