Sundress Reads: Review of Nonbinary Bird of Paradise

In Emilia Phillips’ Nonbinary Bird of Paradise (The University of Akron Press, 2024), God is many things: they are “a knot / that knows how to untie itself,” “the first/war,”  a “voyeur, who gave / [the speaker] dreams to cover the dark / valley of [their] loneliness / with wildflowering / mosquitoes” (19, 21, 6). Overflowing with references to their upbringing in the church, Phillips chronicles the manifestations of gods in their childhood, weaving their own queerness into retellings of stories from the Judeo-Christian and classical canon. Nonbinary Bird of Paradise is a reckoning with, and reclamation of, this volatile past–both their personal history, and a greater human mythology stained with misogyny, queer erasure, and a relentless centering of heterosexuality.

The collection begins with a Genesis-like series of poems titled “Queerness of Eve” divided into twelve ‘books’ (no accident, seeing as the Old Testament depicts the twelve sons of Jacob, the early patriarchs of the Bible). In “Book IV,” the speaker conjoins their own mythology with that of Eve, writing, “Woman always settled / on me like snow / on warm ground. Briefly” (Phillips 9).  Phillips’ Eve feels no closeness with God or Adam, but rather holds a litany of unanswered questions; they write,

Eve turns God’s own strategy against him to create a femme lover in “Book VI,” proclaiming, “God made man / in his own image, / so they say. / So I made a beloved / in mine” (Phillips 13).  The forbidden fruit for this Eve, then, is not fruit at all, but rather “peachflesh / muscled in [their] cage” (Phillips 18). After she and Adam are exiled from the Garden of Eden following God’s discovery of her creation, she divulges, “No one / can exile / me from / desire, not / even / desire” (Phillips 22). In moments like these, Eve carves out an identity for herself in the very spaces in which God and Adam seek to erase her, asking, “How do I make silence / my gender?” (Phillips 9). Throughout the loneliness and subjugation of the “Queerness of Eve,” Phillips skillfully imbues the speaker with quiet resilience; Eve repeatedly returns to her inner fortitude in the midst of punishment from male forces that attempt to control and subdue her. 

In the second part of Nonbinary Bird of Paradise, the reader is wrenched from this somber story of Eve’s exile and punishment for her defiance of God’s heteronormative hierarchies into the undeniable present; the two opening poems are about Wi-Fi and Google. The speaker still visits mythology, but from a distance; on a writer’s retreat, they sleep beneath a painting of the Rape of Io, a river god’s daughter who was raped by the Roman god Jupiter. This, again, interweaves with their own stories as they decide to leave their husband, telling the reader, “I called him to say / I was coming home / soon but not to / him” (Phillips 36).  Later in this section, after more contemporary poems that discuss french horns and butterfly houses, the speaker again inhabits a Biblical woman: the nameless wife of Noah, describing life before and after the flood (here, in a series of poems titled “Antediluvian,” “Diluvian,” “Covenant,” and “Postdiluvian”). Phillips again revisits the dismissal of female voices by Biblical giants; the speaker describes how she

By comparing Noah’s wife to the “captive stock” of the ship (ibid.), and likening the ark to a body being lowered into a grave (58), Phillips forces the reader to consider the manipulation of female lives in service of male whims and dreams.

In its third and final act, Nonbinary Bird of Paradise transports the reader from queer mourning into full-throated queer reclamation. Where there were motifs of profound, ancestral loss learned across generations (alongside dry, self-aware humor: in “Queerness of Eve,” the speaker admits, “You probably guessed / I created the female orgasm / all by my lonesome” (Phillips 3). In this Part Three, we encounter story after story of triumphant and playful defiance. Mythology and literature become a vehicle by which our speaker finds empowerment, a lineage of resistance. In “Emilia, Widow to Iago,” Shakespeare’s Othello serves as a method for our speaker to “dodge the dagger,” faking their death in order to escape cleaning up a man’s mess and avoid being his “rag and mop” (Phillips 74). In the next poem, the speaker again reminisces on a self they’ve shed in the voice of the naiad Daphne, who transformed into a tree to escape the sexual advances of Apollo. Resolute even in a new form, Daphne implores the reader: 

The speaker embraces humor and sensuality as they do their queerness in Part Three as well,  savoring the sonics of the words “lesbian elephants” as they fantasize about draping their trunk over their lover’s shoulders “like a boa constrictor” (Phillips 84). Alongside other delights of Part Three, including a laugh-out-loud poem satirizing gender reveals (“We’re having a cigarette after sex! We’re having it! Like once or twice a week!” [Phillips 69]), the collection’s titular love poem also comes in this section. Phillips writes, “Would you stay/& watch me, even/though I have no blue velvet/skirt or ruby-raw/throat?” (63). The speaker imagines how they would woo their beloved as a bird-of-paradise, without the gendered anatomy to perform standard mating rituals.

In Nonbinary Bird of Paradise, Emilia Phillips critiques, mourns, and reinvents classical stories by giving female queer heroines a voice within their pages. These heroines search for Gods everywhere, and often are left wanting. But by the end of this collection, the speaker has identified a potent God to whom they can speak – that which exists in those they love. In the irreverently gorgeous “Artemis Wears A Strap-On”, they proclaim their worship for their lover: “What is godlike in you,/ I’ll godden” (Phillips 79). I have found much to godden in the vividly transporting pages of Phillips’ fifth collection, Nonbinary Bird of Paradise.

Nonbinary Bird of Paradise is available from the University of Akron Press

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Catie Macauley (they/he/she) is a transmasculine aspiring poet living and working in Boston. They study Sociology, Environmental Studies, and English at Wellesley College, where they also compete on the Wellesley Whiptails frisbee team and perform with the Wellesley Shakespeare Society. A Best of the Net 2024 Nominee, his writing has appeared in brawl lit, The Wellesley News, and the Young Writer’s Project, among other publications. In their free time, Catie enjoys boxing, re-reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and buying far too many books at independent bookstores – primarily the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, where they are somehow lucky enough to work.