feathering, by Livia Meneghin

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Through connections with natural relatives and landscapes such as seabirds, rivers, and fig trees, Livia Meneghin navigates a bountiful world while carrying grief, doubt, and fear. Still, feathering is home to an abundance of love and protection for all she finds precious, including her own body. In particular, feathering is a journey of growth through a cancer diagnosis and coming into queerness as an adult. From new realities come not only challenges and adjustments, but imagination and hope. Meneghin dreams of a picnic where all the queer people of the world can rest and admire wildflowers together. She conjures the comfort of fuzzy puddles of ducklings and delicious muffin tops as reasons to keep going amidst climate catastrophe, fascist regimes, and personal mourning. These poems offer readers permission to connect with their people, their inner calm, and their beauty, all in joy and safety. “Livia Meneghin’s feathering reminds us that joy is a salve, that intimacy is healing. Meneghin’s poems unearth heavenly sensations, creating an enclave of love—of the self, the body, the lover, and the earth. From ‘a quarrel of sparrows’ to ‘the mumbling clouds,’ these poems unfurl landscapes of ‘wildflowers overrunning.’ This book reminds us of the beauty of being alive, of existing in the face of extinction. Of the immense work of greeting each day, holding its heaviness with curiosity and lightness. ” —Tatiana Johnson-Boria, author of Nocturne in Joy “Livia Meneghin’s newest chapbook feathering winds together ecological attunements with queer tendernesses. These myriad tendernesses, as we witness through these poems, emerge from rage, illness, and survival: survival against the institutions that crave queer demise, survival against the betrayals of the heart’s floodplains. Meneghin is a poet whose deft image and form call out as ‘nearby sandpipers [calling] pink, pink, pink,’ and I am again and again and again slain in the spirit. ” —Rajiv Mohabir, author of Whale Aria Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of Honey in My Hair and is the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She’s humbly earned recognition from distinguished entities including the Academy of American Poets, the Writers’ Room of Boston, Breakwater Review’s Peseroff Prize, The Room’s Poetry Contest. Her writing has found homes in Gasher, Thrush, So to Speak, Contemporary Verse 2, and elsewhere. Since earning her MFA, she teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.