carapace, root & feather, by Deidre Cavazzi

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Birds become wildflowers, cicadas serenade lovers, mushrooms converge and a praying mantis claims summer for herself. The poems in carapace, root & feather teem with insect muses, rainstorms, slumbering beasts and schooling fish. Sheep dogs guard their flock and anemones bloom in tidepools. Mother trees whisper to their saplings and wildebeests flow like rivers. This collection is an offering to nature, a magnifying glass for the unseen, a meditation on the passage of time. Themes of transformation, connection and loss echo through the seasons and the storied plants and animals that inhabit these pages, reminding us that we are all root-tangled and destined to sigh back into the earth. That we are luminous and fleeting and searching for home. Deidre Cavazzi is a poet and choreographer based in California, where she can often be found wandering in the redwoods or peering into tidepools. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Dominican University and an MFA in Dance from UC Irvine. She has been an artist-in-residence with The Arctic Circle in Svalbard, the Fish Factory Creative Centre in Iceland, and a guest artist for multiple science communication projects at the University of Galway, Ireland. Deidre also worked as a marine naturalist for six years and is a passionate admirer of elephant seals. Her work has been published by Moon Tide Press, Rust & Moth, Lunch Ticket, Orca, and Tuxedo Journal, and she was a 2024 Falling Walls Finalist in Art & Science.