'If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting' by Anna Journey

Anna Journey's first book of poems, "If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting" (University of Georgia Press: 104 pp., $16.95 paper), is a deeply American debut that deals with the author's Southern childhood and adolescence as a pretty, redheaded girl from the bayou. It's lush with Romanticism: Journey writes with near-perfect pitch about flowers, the suburban eeriness of garden centers, her closeted gay psychiatrist grandfather and the mother who broke her back.

May 24, 2009