Feather Rousing - Paperback

by Rebecca Meacham (Author)

In this "hybridiary" of historical fiction and personal memoir, we peer inside baby incubators at Coney Island, waiting for childhood to take wing. We overhear the dying dreams of the Imperial Romanov family, and we fret the simple act of watching a child walk to class. Hope is a bright and constant thread: a tornado cuts a tender swath; a lady bides time inside a tiger's claws; teenagers preen on screens during pandemic lockdown. Rescues are fumbled but perpetually launched-and love is a gift the way the sun is a gift: constant and consoling, but also blinding, near-obliterating. Tragic, funny, and surreal, FEATHER ROUSING nests in the spaces between caretaking and grief, secret and spectacle, recollection and imagination, global anguish and private joy.

Author Biography

Rebecca Meacham's short story collection, Let's Do (2004), won UNT Press's Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, and her flash fiction collection, Morbid Curiosities (2014), won the New Delta Review chapbook prize. Her work has appeared most recently in BEST MICROFICTION 2021 (Pelekinesis, 2021), Wigleaf, Had, and Gigantic Sequins, and her prose has been set to music, translated into Polish, and carved into woodblocks and letter-pressed by steamroller. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where she directs The Teaching Press and chairs the BFA in Writing and Applied Arts program.