Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird, finalist in the American Best Book Awards, and chapbooks The Optimist Shelters in Place, Parrot Flower, and Still Life. She is an associate poetry editor for Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and assistant professor at Michigan State University.

Books by Kimberly Ann Priest :

Other poems on the web by Kimberly Ann Priest :
"The Book of Birds"
Three poems
"At the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University"
Two poems
Three poems
"Steven Turnball"
"The World is Whatever We Choose to Make It"
"Journal Entry written While the Saltmarsh Sparrows Migrate South for the Winter"
Two poems
"After My Husband Tells Me I Cannot Go Riding Again"
"I Wanted to Be a Boy"

Kimberly Ann Priest 's Website.

Kimberly Ann Priest on Twitter.

About Slaughter the One Bird:

"Priest's poems do the hard work of expanding the language for exploring the experience of abuse and trauma, which means they expand our understanding of (in)humanity. These poems are never predictable. They are like flashes of light in shadowed rooms—dark rooms—with bright, illuminating flashes."
—Sue William Silverman

"In Slaughter the One Bird, Kimberly Ann Priest takes the pain and trauma of a life and creates art. Priest is a poet I cannot stop reading—her skillfulness with language, imagery, form, and story pulled this reader in, leaving me breathless with each and every poem—'curtains of chrysalis and wing / butterfly houses for sale on the road to embargo / his elbow in the mouth of a wasp nest // all honey, no sting.' This poignant and haunting work is unafraid to explore trauma and survival. These are powerful, courageous poems that are needed in the world—they give voice to the voiceless and they make space for the vulnerable, ultimately showing us the strength to make it through. Slaughter the One Bird is a remarkable collection that reminded me of the incredible power of women poets and well-written poems."
—Kelli Russell Agodon

"Priest opens herself to her readers like a surgeon, driving heartache and heartbreak home as though her poems were scrawled by a pen clenched in an angry fist. Slaughter the One Bird is brave, beautiful, irreverent, and incredibly relevant, its narrator travailing a landscape of domesticity gone sour, the scars of childhood, and all the secrets that make us who we are."
—Holly Day

"Framed by the Old Testament purification ritual for cleansing leprosy from a house, Kimberly Ann Priest's newest collection, Slaughter the One Bird, depicts the devastation that pedophilia wreaks when its plague is allowed to fester. In language as brutal as it is lyrical, Priest incisively describes a child 'born of secrets and teeth,' a 'girl [who] counts the seconds it would take / for a man twice her age to undress her' after she becomes the victim of a fellow churchgoer's sexual predation. As childhood predator morphs into abusive spouse, the courageous voice in Priest's visceral poetry exposes how both men want 'the right to space everything symmetrically / rearrange a life.' Now wife and mother, she laments how a woman's body becomes a man's false paradise when she remarks, 'If only we knew beforehand / what would come of our longings / for Eden. What damage we would make.' Despite this damage, she lives to speak her truth and teach her son to embrace a less costly version of paradise. In a field of strawberries, he mimics her enjoyment of the fruit while 'lift[ing] his face to the afternoon sun.'"
—Julie L. Moore