Son of a Bird by Nin Andrews Review by Beth Gylys

Son of a Bird by Nin Andrews

Review by Beth Gylys

Publisher: Etruscan Press

Publication Date: April 29, 2025

ISBN: 979-8988198598

Pages: 133

Whether writing about orgasms or childhood illness, Nin Andrews—author of fifteen books of poetry—has the uncanny ability to immerse us in her world with a clear-eyed sense of wonder. Her latest publication, Son of a Bird, is a unique and moving verse memoir that introduces us to her chaotic and sometimes brutal childhood. The young Andrews was plagued by repeated eye surgeries and life-threatening accidents and illnesses. “I was stung by swarms of bees, bitten by stray dogs, clawed by feral cats, bucked by horses, butted by a bull, and one morning, found unconscious on the side of a road by a truck driver,” she tells us. 

Her parents were quirky, neglectful and idiosyncratic, and “Death” (whether as apparition or metaphorical threat), appeared regularly to her, “sweeping the sky with his wings.” Still, the book captivates with its unfamiliar, vividly described scenes from her past which she conveys with a deft, unflinching, light touch. Reading Son of a Bird, we come to understand that Andrews’s unusual upbringing encouraged the singular voice of her poetry, the unvarnished playful, wry aesthetic that makes her work so compelling.

The youngest of six, she grew up on a farm, a setting rife with animal life and adventure as well as the constant reminders of life’s dangers and fragility. Pets and animals appear in abundance: she and her sisters raised cows; hosts of kittens were tossed from cars near their farm. Her mother even once rescued a seagull, hurling it from their porch to teach it to fly. And death was all around them. Kittens were killed by dogs which (after the carcasses were buried) they promptly dug up and carried in their mouths “like toys.” Nin’s beloved pet bull Melvin disappeared and then her family ate steak for days, her mother chewing “happily” and asserting, “they say that love makes the meat rich and sweet.” And there was a missing brother whose absence casts a shadow through the book: “He took himself out of the picture,” she writes, and “I don’t have to tell you” why. This admission and omission serve to foreshadow Andrews’s own eventual reckoning with mental illness and suicidal ideation. 

In the second section/chapter of the book, “My Mother Was a Little Brown Bird,” Andrews introduces us more fully to her mother who lived with undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome and who prized toughness and science and eschewed all things sentimental. Trained as a classicist and described as “immune to worry,” Andrews’s mother resisted touch, gave birth to her children on a pre-determined schedule, and was forever running outdoors—even during hurricane warnings. “My mother despised other mothers,” she tells us,“ especially those who coddled and gushed over their children.” Her mother’s mannerisms are conveyed without judgment, though Andrews seemingly longed for a more traditional mother: “‘Don’t,’ she’d say, pushing me back when I ran towards her, begging to be picked up. ‘You mustn’t cling.’” 

Andrews’s father, an architect who was only slightly more of a caregiver than her mother (when she or one of her siblings awakened in the middle of the night, he would be the one to attend to them), was “a man of secrets.” Though gay, he proposed to her mother after claiming to be “cured.” He’d submitted to some kind of conversion therapy program with “a real quack,” her mother told her. When Andrews inquired about a box of love letters (which she had discovered at the back of a closet) from a naval officer named Benjamin, written to her father before her parents’ marriage, her mother shrugged it off, “a lot of women married homosexuals back then.” Later in the book, her parents, we are told, squabbled constantly, a sign that the seams may have been coming apart; still, Andrews depicts her father with compassionate dispassion—his serving 12-year-old Andrews whiskey to help cure a high fever seems as much doting as delinquent: “It was kinda nice, sipping whiskey side by side, feeling our liquor-love burn a hole inside my gut,” she writes. 

The title of the book and of chapter three is a referent to the nickname given to Andrews by her beloved nanny, Miss Mary, the woman who essentially raised her, loved her as her own, and served as a centering force for Andrews as she grew up. Where is that son of a bird?, Miss Mary would ask when her young charge had disappeared or misbehaved. “Miss Mary was my protector, mother, first love, goddess.” In this section, focusing on the hired workers on their farm, the lens of the book widens, giving us a glimpse into the larger framework of relationship that Andrews grew up within. Her parents might not have been especially nurturing, but they fostered their children’s individuality and unique sensibilities, exposing them to a broad range of experiences and a spectrum of people of various ages and socioeconomic backgrounds—great fodder for a would-be writer.  

Whether her eventual breakdown is a result of the past finally catching up to her, or an inevitability due to mental illness, or both, upon leaving for college, Andrews spirals into obsessive discontentment during the book’s climax. Sleepless, neurotic, she struggles to finish writing assignments, chronically, feverishly revising and rewriting and plagued by insecurity and perfectionism: “So many words to choose from, so many meanings, so much distance between what I thought and what I wrote on the page.” As she describes a prolonged period of depression (days spent despondent and/or sleeping, first back home and then with her sister in Seattle after an attempted suicide), we are left to wonder how much the crisis was prompted by the incongruities and difficulties of her childhood and how much by being so far removed from her family, Miss Mary, and the defining community that shaped her. As for many other poets who have struggled with mental illness (Sexton, Plath, Berryman, Roethke…), after the depression lifted, writing offered her a way forward, “Whole pages of my life fluttered around me,” she tells us, “I couldn’t write fast enough.”    

Andrews is haunted by her past, but also (a little) charmed by the wild freedom it afforded her as she grew into herself. All families have unacknowledged trauma, unmet challenges, unhappy members. That Andrews manages to enchant us with this material and its flawed but endearing cast of characters is a tribute to her gifts as a writer and to the emotional/psychological work she has done. This is just how it was, she seems to be saying on every page of her captivating book.

Nin Andrews is the author of fifteen poetry collections including The Last Orgasm (2020), Miss August (2017), and Why God is a Woman (2015) and the recipient of two Ohio individual artists grants, the Pearl Chapbook prize, The Wick Chapbook contest, and the Gerald Cable Award. Her poetry has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, Agni, The Paris Review, four editions of Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, The Best of the Prose Poem, an International Journal, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Poetry, and The Best American Erotic Poems. Her poetry has been translated into Turkish, performed in Prague, and anthologized in England, Australia, and Mongolia. She is also the editor of a book of translations of the Belgian writer, Henri Michaux.

Award-winning author, Distinguished Professor at Georgia State University, and the co-founder/Principal Investigator of Beyond Bars: A Journal of Literature and Art, a Mellon sponsored literary journal for incarcerated writers and artists, Beth Gylys is the author of five books of poetry and three chapbooks, most recently After My Father and The Conversation Turns to Wide Mouthed Jars. Winner of the Gerald Cable Award for poetry and the Journal Prize, awarded a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, and with two books chosen as Books All Georgians Should Read, her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the Birmingham Poetry Review, West Branch, The James Dickey Review, SWWIM and on the Best American Poetry blog.  

21 January 2026