wyrd] bird

"Wyrd] bird grapples with the impossibility and necessity of affirming mystical experience in a world fraught with ecological and individual loss. It is at once a book-length lyric essay on the 12th-century German mystic, Hildegard of Bingen, a dream journal, fragmentary notebook, collection of poems, and scrapbook of photographic ephemera. Stancek follows Hildegard as a guide through an underworld of climate catastrophe and political violence populated by figures from Milton's Eve to the biblical Satan to Keats's hand. The book deconstructs a Western tradition of good and evil by rereading,…