Juliet Wilson, poet, blogger and author of Unthinkable Skies posted a review of Birds Nobody Loves on her blog Crafty Green Poet:

The poetry is well observed, here is someone who clearly watches birds carefully and has a way with words to describe them in striking ways. The poems show the more engaging sides of the birds and also comment more directly on people’s hatred of them.

Juliet was also the first to publish any of my vulture and grackle poems: “Good Authority” and “My Tourist Yard” first appeared on her literary e-journal Bolts of Silk back in 2009. Thanks, Juliet!

Deb Scott over at Stony Moss wrote a nice post about how Birds Nobody Loves looks, works and reads on iPads, Kindles and paper so I figured I’d put something up here by way of explaining how it came to exist in its various forms.

I kicked around the idea of doing Birds Nobody Loves as an e-book but an illustrated book of poetry seemed like it would carry a pretty steep learning curve for a first e-book what with the whole line break issue and that kept me from pursuing it until I read Nic Sebastian’s Dark and Like a Web on my phone (before buying the paperback) and saw how well it worked. I read her blog posts on the subject and learned how she used Dave Bonta’s hanging indent solution in her e-books and so, I decided to give it a try.

I coded the EPUB version of Birds Nobody Loves using eCub. It was surprisingly easy for me considering I’ve spent a lot of time playing with the HTML and CSS on this blog over the years. That was the biggest surprise for me: an e-book is nothing but a series of web pages governed by a CSS file. Who knew?

It wasn’t long before I had an EPUB file that looked great on my phone and that took my breath away when I saw it on a borrowed iPad, which rendered the illustrations beautifully. And, the hanging indents worked too.

Next up was Kindle-izing the thing, which required a conversion to MOBI format. ECub works with Amazon’s Kindlegen to create a MOBI file but when I checked it in Amazon’s Kindle previewer, which lets you see what your book looks like on various Kindle devices, I was horrified to learn that while it looked great on the Fire it looked awful on all the other Kindles. I could “fix” this by removing the hanging indent code, which made it look okay across all devices but the poetry would lose the formatting if the reader made the font too big.

I messed around with the code for the better part of the day and then gave up, figuring I could either ditch the whole hanging indent idea for Kindles or just not release it for Kindle at all. I thought there had to be a way for the book to know what kind of device it was being played on and then serve up the hanging indent CSS if it was being played on a Fire, but how?

And here’s yet another reason why I love the Internet: there’s always someone smarter out there with the same problem I’m working on. That very night, Liz Castro at Pigs, Gourds and Wikis posted an excellent tutorial on how to get hanging indents in a poetry e-book (using the same technique Dave worked out) and how to make them work on ALL Kindle devices by having the book serve CSS geared toward whichever Kindle device was playing the book. It took less than 10 minutes to have the Kindle version working perfectly.

The Nook was another matter. The EPUB file seems to play well on my Dad’s Nook but when I uploaded it to the Nook Store, I found that Barnes & Noble seems to make changes to the file that destroy all the line breaks. Either that or the Nook doesn’t read EPUB like Apple’s products. So, sorry Nook users, I haven’t solved that one yet.

After that it was easy to upload the book to Lulu, the iBookstore and the Kindle Store.

Now, go pay Deb a visit and see what she has to say about it. And then read her blog.

Margo Roby interviewed me at her Wordgathering blog today. We talk about Birds Nobody Loves, vultures, grackles, poetry, self-publishing and writing in general. Check it out.

Thanks, Margo!

The first review of Birds Nobody Loves is up at bhulbhulaiyan:

I was amazed that I would even like pieces about birds- let alone, ones nobody loves. I mean, I could imagine poems about blue birds and peacocks and the like…but grackles?? Number one, what in heaven’s name is a grackle? To my amazement, I enjoyed each piece. By the third read, I was seeing layers in some of the pieces…wise layers…intriguing layers. I knew this was a keeper.

Thanks, Anjuli!

I’m thrilled to announce that my first poetry collection Birds Nobody Loves: A Book of Vultures & Grackles is now live.

Here’s where you can go to get a copy:

Paperback edition on Amazon

Paperback edition at my CreateSpace store

Or if you have one of them new-fangled e-reader contraptions, it’s available in both Kindle and EPUB format (it looks startlingly nice on the iPad I borrowed on which to test it):

Kindle edition at Amazon

EPUB edition (for iPad, iPhone and most other readers) at Lulu

It’s also available in the iBookstore.

These birds will continue to fly around the internet and automatically take up roost in many other online booksellers over the next few weeks.

I hope you’ll consider ordering a copy. Thanks also to all of you who’ve read and commented on these poems as they’ve appeared on this blog and in various other venues over the past three years.

Almost three years ago, I started writing poems about vultures and grackles because, well, someone had to do it. I imagined eventually putting them together into a short collection and now that collection is about finished. Birds Nobody Loves: A Book of Vultures & Grackles is in its final proof stage and will (barring unforeseen complications) become available for order/download next week, probably Tuesday or Wednesday. More details and links to follow.

It’s been an interesting road to this point, writing these poems and trying to decide what to do with them beyond sharing them here. I’ve learned a lot about two of the most common and least-liked birds around here (the turkey and black vultures, the great-tailed and common grackles) and even more about crafting poems. Readers of this blog will have read earlier drafts of most of these poems here or at one of the online journals kind enough to publish them*, so they’re available around these parts, though many of them have undergone revision.

Not long ago, I came to the conclusion that the thing that made the most sense to me was to go ahead and publish this myself. In large part because I just love the fact that I live in a world where I can. That thrills me. I registered Coyote Mercury Press at the county clerk’s office, bought some ISBN numbers (I have a few other projects up my sleeve), and set the title up using Createspace. It will be available in multiple formats: paperback, .epub (for iPad, Nook and Sony), .mobi (for Kindle) and likely .pdf as well.

I’ll write some more about this between now and next week, and I plan to give away 5 paperback copies to anyone with a blog who might like to write a review or do an interview or whatever else. If you’re interested or would just like to receive an email when it’s available with links for ordering/downloading, let me know using the contact form above.

Update: The 5 review copies are now spoken for.

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*Bolts of Silk, Thirteen Myna Birds, a handful of stones, Four and Twenty, tinywords, Houston Literary Review, Pay Attention: A River of Stones Anthology, Nothing. No One. Nowhere., qarrtsiluni, and Curio Poetry

I’m honored to have two poems, “Winter Solstice” and “In the Time of the Automobile” (both from my upcoming collection Birds Nobody Loves–More to come stay tuned) in the inaugural issue of Curio Poetry alongside the work of several other fine poets. Thanks to editors Joseph Harker and Tessa Racht for starting this journal and including some of my work. Now, go check it out.

My videopoem “While Sitting in Church” was featured yesterday over at qarrtsiluni as part of the Worship issue. The poem is from my Birds Nobody Loves series, which will hopefully soon become a short collection when I can find the time to finish it off. Anyway, check it out, and thanks to issue editors Kaspa and Fiona who accepted it within hours of my submission. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten an acceptance so fast. It’s a great issue they’ve put together so spend a while checking things out, especially Sherry Chandler’s “Doxology.”

I made this back in March and never got around to uploading it and then forgot all about it until something sparked my memory yesterday. It’s based my poem of the same name, originally posted a little over a year ago. This is the second video I’ve made from my Birds Nobody Loves series (the first was “Chasing Westward”).

The images are photoshopped versions of some of my pictures of black and turkey vultures. I’m planning to use these as illustrations in the Birds Nobody Loves collection I’m slowly (so slowly) putting together.

The real purpose of this video was experimental. I wanted to try to figure out how to make my editing software do the “Ken Burns effect” that was so nicely done in “Beach/Snow” a beautiful video by Peter Stephens. It was complicated but once I had it figured out, it got a lot easier to get the pans and zooms I wanted.

The music is by Oleg Serkov downloaded from Jamendo and licensed under a cc-by-nc-sa license. This is the first time I’ve used Jamendo for music for a video. There’s a lot of good stuff there besides Mr. Serkov’s wonderful work.

As to the poem, it comes from the church I attended when I was in high school. It was built on the edge of a cliff overlooking Lake Travis. They built it lengthwise and placed the altar on the long side which was made entirely of glass so it was easy to let your mind wander out to the open sky above the lake where turkey vultures circled endlessly.

I’ve always found it strange that church is held indoors but that church anyway made it feel like you weren’t completely disconnected from the natural world, which is why I still consider it the most beautiful church I’ve ever seen.

It is also where my fascination with vultures began. Watching them each Sunday, thinking about their place in the scheme of things and watching their effortless flight, I couldn’t help but fall in love with them while witnessing in awe the sheer wonder and beauty of creation.

Good Authority

I always thought they’d like death metal,
but I’ve got it on good authority
vultures prefer smooth jazz.

Ambulance rides can be rough;
vultures know this and relax.
Watching the highway, they know
everyone gets his turn.

Turkey vultures can smell a corpse
from hundreds of feet up. Outflying
Cessnas they arrive first on the scene.

Black vultures follow, pushing
the solitary turkeys to the rotting edges.

The black vultures brag that by traveling
together they’ve learned to attack and kill
small animals: calves and possums.

Straightening their ties, they discuss
elaborate plans to go public. Someday,
they claim, they will become hawks or eagles.

The turkey vulture listens to this talk,
wondering if he too will evolve.

—

This is a rerun of sorts. It was published 2 years ago over at Bolts of Silk (thanks, Juliet!) and I thought I’d bring it over here in its slightly modified form. I’m in the process of putting together all my Birds Nobody Loves poems into a short collection, making a few minor changes here and there. I’ll write more about it as I get closer to releasing these birds…