Written by a third-culture kid who grew up in the Middle East and relocated to Texas as a teenager, Summer of the Oystercatchers is a wide-ranging collection of poems that grapple with global interconnection, hilarious and cringe-worthy stories from a cross-cultural childhood, the bruising fingerprints of fundamentalist Christianity and Islam, the many joys of the heart’s slow softening, and the many griefs of insurmountable distances. In a voice sometimes personal and sometimes planetary, this book speaks to the historic and contemporary suppression of women’s experiences and the roles religion and tradition have played in perpetuating those norms.
From puffins to pigeons and Hamlet to Monticello, the book leans heavily into history, literature, and the natural world for a crisp commentary on the troubles and promise of our own times, and ultimately to tell a story of faith expanding beyond the borders set for it.
Bryana Joy’s Summer of the Oystercatchers introduces us to a voice worth befriending, a speaker who we might want to talk with about God over cups of tea. Her diverse subjects (the poems touch on everything from puffins to drone strikes) are held together by a consistently tender gaze. Most impressively, Summer of the Oystercatchers manages the tricky feat of being earnest without slipping into territory that is saccharine or shallow. These poems seamlessly pivot between explorations of nostalgia, affection, and love and moments of anger, questioning, and insistence (particularly, insistence on a healthy vision of God and an awareness of the horrors of the world). Even when these poems buzz with frustration or dread, Joy’s tenderness never feels far behind. “I want all the people I’ve ever friended / to come to my house with their stories, / their offspring, their pictures of God,” Joy writes. If you’re anything like me, you’ll finish this book feeling like you’ve also been ushered into the experience of that warm and personal gathering.
–Megan McDermott, author of Jesus Merch: A Catalog in Poems, Woman as Communion, and Prayer Book for Contemporary Dating
Summer of the Oystercatchers is a beautiful collection of poetry, its arresting imagery and word play swirling us through the poet’s life, childhood to present young adulthood, a book-length dream quest for God’s world and its bounty, a blessed, peaceable kingdom, family and friends “circumferenced” around a table.
Of course it’s a spiritual quest to reclaim a land held in the poet’s heart, a land “grown tiny and / tender and haunted.” She acknowledges “the danger of loving fragile things,” asking “why everything / loveable is perishable.” She would take the world in her arms-“every warm and frightened / animal body,” reclaiming the lost, “coming as fast as I can.” Please live. And she refuses to accept any answer to the question of why there is violence in the world, a world of “insatiable wolves,” warheads from Hellfire missiles aiming for whole families, their children. The violence of men against women. The tears of the world’s sisters. Lord have mercy, the poet cries. “We’re not / meant to seal our ears to all this bleating.” Yes, she says, “we can do better,” her answer to violence, echoing Viktor Frankl’s insistence that we are being questioned “daily and hourly” by life, with our answer to what life expects from us being “in right action and in right conduct” (from Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning), the poet’s answer also affirming what God wants-not blood, not “the camps the / nighttime raids the cattle prods”; what the poet expects from God is mercy.
How fitting that Summer of the Oystercatchers ends with the poet’s reacquaintance with God: “Me and God are good buddies actually,” big fans of “Planet Earth,” its summer weather evenings, the “heathered hills” of rabbits, “piping plovers,” and most importantly all those silenced “sisters from history” now invited to sit down with “Me and God” and speak their “unraveled minds.” And the sun is not dying. The “shining world / is full of light,” and “the cows, / too, go on flicking their tails with / astonishing spunk under the orange sky.”
–Dr. Robert A. Fink, author of Strange You Never Knew, Beyond Where the West Begins, The Tongues of Men and of Angels, The Ghostly Hitchhiker, and Azimuth Points
Bryana Joy Beaird
is a poet, watercolor artist, and author-illustrator who has lived in Türkiye, Texas, and England and now resides in Eastern Pennsylvania. Her poetry has appeared in over sixty literary journals, and her traditionally illustrated stories, poems, and personal essays have reached subscribers in more than thirty countries. You can find her online at www.bryanajoy.com or on Instagram & Threads at @_bryana_joy.