By Marisol Cortez. Finishing Line Press, 2025.

Written in the years after returning home to South Texas, The Bird Church tends to the urban microfauna—the grackles, koi, chicharras, cosmos, feral parrots, snoutnosed butterflies, but also the ornamental fruit and children—which persist in the unsupervised scars of highways and inland refineries. Less a poetry of witness than of attention, The Bird Church considers “what is here”: the ordinary life that persists and survives amid the occupations of colonial history and its current climate and political crises.

Rooted in San Antonio, Marisol Cortez writes across genre about place and power for all the other borderwalking weirdos out there. She is author of the award-winning South Texas cli-fi novel Luz at Midnight (FlowerSong Press 2020), as well as The Bird Church (Finishing Line Press 2025) and I Call on the Earth (Double Drop Press 2019), a chapbook of documentary poetry that bears witness to the forced removal of Mission Trails Mobile Home Community. She is currently Executive Editor at Deceleration, an online journal for environmental justice thought and praxis (deceleration.news). Other projects and publications can be found at mcortez.net.