• In (aviary) Genevieve Kaplan both relishes and challenges her limitations within these dynamic garden spaces and grants herself permission to re-design their elements of birds, leaves, beak taps, sugar, and shade.  Borrowing scraps and hearsay from Mina Loy’s “Ladies in an Aviary,” Kaplan ponders her own complicit inclinations.  The poems’ syntactical phrases veer, skip, and hover, defying time and vantage points: “the only fine thing, the only petaled thing, the gray / path slowly curving to the right, to the left, curving away the only only / soft thing.”  At once furtive and bold, Kaplan considers the very “nature” of herself and these spaces and “how / to get outside enough to see myself looking in.” An intricate and gorgeous book by one of our most inventive poets. – Molly Bendall
• An aviary is a cage one enters to be close to birds. And in this (aviary), Genevieve Kaplan focuses on imprisonment with two curved fences of parentheses around the title in her magisterial book built from layers of fragmentation, collage, reprise, and the arid south of inland California. Mina Loy’s poem, “Ladies in an Aviary,” is inspiration and prism through which Kaplan approaches large questions: how to see and risk being seen, how to be the creek winding down the hill, drying up, secreting oneself under dirt, how to delve into power dynamics between men and women, humans and the natural world, how to interrogate language itself.  – Marsha de la O
• Genevieve Kaplan’s poems in (aviary) expertly interlace human and nonhuman experience as only the best poets can so to find the solutions for life on this challenging planet, “body is a short-haired animal and uncomfortable in being so observed.” This poetry flies to the top with brilliance! – CAConrad

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Download the Press Kit here.

Buy a copy at Small Press Distribution, Bookshop.org, Amazon, or directly from the publisher at the Veliz Books website.

Reviews

• “Kaplan’s intricately woven poems examine and expose imbalances of power” –Erica Goss reviews (aviary) in Sticks & Stones
• “Standing alongside recent resurgences in blackout poetry, erasure work, centos, and even visual poems that collage type for their physical impact, Kaplan uses Loy as a generative spark for her own creation, and, in a move toward open-ended meaning-making, urges the reader to build on this with an almost Rube Goldberg-esque tipping forward of creative processing.” – Elline Lipkin reviews (aviary) in Women’s Studies: an interdisciplinary journal
• “Kaplan invents a register of lyric wildcraft encouraging readers to interrogate the structures that contain their spirits from the vantage of stepping outside of them, hopefully into the verdant world.” – Sara Ellen Fowler reviews (aviary) in Rhino
• “Composed amid parenthesis, Kaplan’s (aviary) writes in and around the margins of containment, from imprisonment to safekeeping, wrapped around a consideration of both birds and women as requiring protection, unable to do more than preen, pose and sing.” -Rob McClennan reviews (aviary) on his blog
  
• Katie Manning reviews (aviary)–and reads her favorite poem–on her YouTube Poetry Reviews channel
• “…the birds, although they tap on the human-made iron fences and use them as natural items, pay less attention to them than they do to nature itself.” -Saad Alsoghair reviews (aviary) for Athena