Carrie Green is the author of Studies of Familiar Birds: Poems (Able Muse Press, 2020). She earned her MFA at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, River Styx, Flyway, Blackbird, Cave Wall, DIAGRAM, and many other journals. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky, and works as a librarian in a public library.

Books by Carrie Green:

Other poems on the web by Carrie Green:
Four poems
Two poems
Three poems
"Selecting Oranges in Lue Gim Gong's Grove"
"Green Heron (PLATE XXVII)"
Two poems
"Robbing the Bees"

Carrie Green's Website.

About Studies of Familiar Birds:

"Carrie Green's poems are as exquisitely crafted as the nests they depict, honoring the delicacy of loss. STUDIES OF FAMILIAR BIRDS explores, through elegy, ekphrasis, and ode, the tender affections for family and nature. Whether it is the nineteenth-century egg-and-nest illustrations of Genevieve and Virginia Jones, the avid gaze upon commonplace birds, or the remembrance of the poet's own beloved father, this collection of poems creates an aviary of light. Green writes with such grace and skill that the reader can't help but feel both the ache of having lost and the joy of having loved. I will return to this book again and again as it 'teach[es] us to sing our grief.'"
—Amy Fleury

"Birds are the embodiment of freedom; unconstrained by terrestrial limitations, they lift effortlessly into the sky, forming a feathery link between Heaven and earth. People who have been visited by angels report they have bird wings. After losing her father to cancer, Carrie Green felt a kinship with Virginia Jones who endeavored to put her grief into concrete form by completing the drawings of nests and eggs for the book her daughter had just begun before she died in 1879. With words chosen as carefully as birds select components for a nest, STUDIES OF FAMILIAR BIRDS masterfully intertwines Carrie's insight into Virginia's griefwork with memories of her father and descriptions of altered photographs from Sara Angelucci's Aviary series, which merges images of endangered birds with anonymous nineteenth-century portraits."
—Joy M. Kiser

"We associate poets with birds: they mourn, call, cry, warn, and fly to places the gravity-bound human body can only follow with ear, eye, and heart. Weaving accounts of winged things into unique receptacles for grief and praise 'But surely we all know/ this nest. We've found it/ in our coffee cans, / in our barns and privies-/ inside all our little caves/ of emptiness, mundane as pockets/ or a child's boot forgotten/ by the back door, ' Green resists the temptation to anthropomorphize, honoring in her animal subjects their inimitable features, instincts, capacities, and wildness. Her archive is the warp and weft of the world's remnants, 'whether/ silk or weed stem, / velvet or vine, ' garnering from them wisdom on how to survive life's losses and to sing despite them."
—Lisa Russ Spaar