In the ingenious and vividly imagined narrative poem The Lumberjack’s Dove, GennaRose Nethercott describes a woodsman who cuts off his hand with an axe—however, instead of merely being severed, the hand shapeshifts into a dove. Far from representing just an event of pain and loss in the body, this incident spirals outward to explore countless facets of being human, prompting profound reflections on sacrifice and longing, time and memory, and—finally—the act of storytelling itself. The lumberjack, his hand, and the axe that separated the two all become participants in the story, with unique perspectives to share and lessons to impart. “I taught your fathers how to love,” Axe says to the acorns and leaves around her. “I mean to be felled, sliced to lumber, & reassembled into a new body.”

Inflected with the uncanny enchantment of modern folklore and animated by the sly shifting of points of view, The Lumberjack’s Dove is wise, richly textured poetry from a boundlessly creative new voice.