Bird Skin Coat is brimming with startling moments of beauty found within a rusty and decayed landscape. With wild lyrical images of ascent and descent - doves and dives, sparrows and slugs, attics and cellars - this collection reflects Sorby's keen eye for blending images. As they shuttle between the Upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, these poems explore how the radical instability of the world is also the source of its energy. The woman he hit is still 42. She notes with wonder how her parka fits her perfectly the way a dove's skin holds the whole bird together. Fate is not a thing with feathers, it's old, bald, and blind, a pope who can't decipher the man's name, David Pratt, as he scrawls it on scratch paper. This is an excerpt from ""Bird Skin Coat"".