Kate Hanson Foster’s Crow Funeral reads best in November when most birds have migrated south for the winter—sky animals densely populate the collection and bird poems are best read without the distraction of winged things. Crow Funeral lands easily on a weekday around ten in the morning when the house is empty of children because the collection encompasses the uncertainty of life’s choices, including the decision to parent. Foster’s poems are best read in solitude and in one sitting because this collection of deeply emotive, sharp, and worldly poems will provide more than enough company and warmth. Foster spends Crow Funeral interrogating ambiguity, flying with motherhood, and observing, with crystal-like vulnerability, the birds that serve as our most insightful metaphors.
Foster refuses to shy away from the allusive. She instead leans towards some version of the word “thing” to write towards her themes without being overly directive. “Thing,” for Foster, is a tool that allows her to craft intimate scenes while also allowing each poem to bend around the reader’s experience. Foster is at her best when she’s writing around certainty and into nothingness. In “The First Gunshot,” she ends by declaring that we tell ourselves safety is fleeing:
No fear. No fight. No flight into action because
it’s not going to happen. Not to you. Not today.
Foster uses this negative space to provide a hole for the reader to fill with their own experience, their own contemplation of what, in this case, a gunshot is. Foster empowers her reader to think for themselves while guiding them where to start. Later, Foster invites her reader to be the nothingness. In “We Who Are Nothing”:
Come
infinite answer
to our infinite want—because
there is nothing
desire cannot split
open. Nothing
need can’t catch
before it lands.
Foster’s nothingness isn’t trying to answer a question—it is calling to the emptiness in all of us. In “Vessel,” Foster pushes into this internal void:
Move aside the stock threads of that empty dress—
the strands of the streets you never traveled.
Foster’s work examines life’s decisions. We know we carry the choices we’ve made: the children we’ve birthed, the jobs we’ve worked, the planes we’ve hopped. Crow Funeral interrogates these choices and further asks something—if the path not taken is what actually comprises who we are: the street we never walked, the solitude we never felt. Foster uses her decision to be a mother to contemplate her capacity as a vessel.
She bravely gazes into the unknown without trying to articulate what gazes back. Foster shows us her uncertainty and she allows the reader to feel the same.
Because of Foster’s brilliant and abundant irresolution, when she does decide to be definite, she is precise as a knife. In “The Birds” Foster starts with uncertainty:
I have no way of knowing how
or why I will be discarded.
And ends with conviction:
In one formidable blow,
the birds fly out.
I am anxious. I am moldered.
I should mention the sky.
Foster cannot know anything except how she feels, she cannot know what might’ve been or what will come to be or if the vast expanse of nothingness even matters. But she can know her own heart; she can give herself, and her reader, that gift.
Crow Funeral ultimately succeeds in the way it aims for stable footing against an ever-changing ground. And although Foster rarely mentions the sky, she mentions the birds over and over again. In the title poem, Foster muses on our collective struggle to exist with grief:
and then more. They know sooner or later
to move on. The clouds always let go,
the wind falls apart. Everyone knows sooner or later
we have to stop counting.
Foster wants us to live within what never came to be, what we don’t know, what we cannot answer. Throughout Crow Funeral, Foster continually refuses the certainty of a God (in “911”) or advice from other writers (in “A Bag of Dirt”), or even her own platitudes (in “Selva Oscura”). Foster navigates through fog and she encourages us to wade into muddy waters.
The collection opens with an epigraph from Candace Savage’s Bird Brains: “Total omniscience is a lot to expect, even from a crow.” Buoyed by these words alongside Foster’s vivid and precise observations, the reader learns from Crow Funeral that the pursuit of total knowing is unimportant and perhaps even reckless. We might all learn to trust the ambiguity, the expanse, and the elusive birds of the sky.
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Yetta Rose Stein reads and writes in Livingston, Montana. She is a mostly curious agnostic Jew whose work has appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Rejected Lit Mag, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Hellgate High School and is an MFA candidate at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
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