At the end of Pinion, the poet confesses, “Last night, I let in all the birds.” Ann Arbor writer Monica Rico does just that in her new poetry collection, Pinion.

Poems in Pinion contemplate birds. Moreover, the people—a father, mother, grandmother, grandfather, uncle, sister, and husband—take on the qualities of the birds: owls, a cardinal, a robin, ravens, and more species. The poem “Five Things Borrowed” shares a memory that merges with geese and an owl:

                                      The time I heard the geese

                         traveling with the moon

I believed I was hallucinating and now when they wake me

            I know I’m not and imagine I am

                       an owl              falling swiftly
                       on the sound.

Birds become an integral way of understanding what happens.

Time goes by, and birds come and go. Yet, some elements, like family, food, and life in Michigan, which are themes in Pinion, stay. A poem called “Ferment” teaches us about the perennial task of making bread:

it likes the gentle heat of your hands
the pull, tuck, and snap of applause—
years gone by and yet here you are

somehow, flour on the counter, flour on the floor,
small scabs of dough mark your palms and you
are both elastic and everything.

Bread, the stuff of life, provides sustenance and meaning, much like these poems.  

Rico, a native of Saginaw, talked about her writing, birds, Michigan, family, food, and poetic forms via email.  

Q: What brought you to the University of Michigan for your MFA? Where has your writing taken you since then?
A: Well, I have lived in Ann Arbor since the early 2000s. I used to look at the MFA program and dream, but I didn’t think it was possible until my friend and mentor, Keith Taylor, suggested I apply to the program. I did and it worked out. I immediately started the research and poems that would become Pinion. I was publishing sporadically before the MFA and then afterward, I got to publish a lot more. But perhaps that had more to do with the fact that I had a good packet of poems to submit—meaning my poems had a theme to them. I’m not sure where or what the MFA did for me. Confidence or not giving a fuck what anyone had to say about my work? I suppose some of that is necessary—especially when you want to write about something as cliche as your grandma and birds.

Q: Tell us about your position as program manager and editor-in-chief for the Bear River Writers’ Conference.
A: I started working for Bear River years ago after I was an attendee at the conference. I had just turned 30, and I was deciding whether or not I wanted to continue as a poet or if I wanted to work in kitchens instead. I had the naive idea that I could not do both. Bear River gave me the spark that I needed, and afterward, I wanted to work with the conference to help and encourage other writers. It was a dream job to me—to work with writers and be in the beautiful space that is Northern Michigan. But three years ago, I received a devastating cancer diagnosis, and I had to leave my position. I have been unable to work since then because my treatments have been hard.

Q: It sounds like Bear River was pivotal for your writing. Also, cancer is the worst! In 2021, you won the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry, selected by Kaveh Akbar, for Pinion, which was published in March 2024. What did submitting to and winning this prize involve?
A: Not much, really. I got Pinion ready and sent it to three or four places. I was a finalist at one and got a really encouraging letter from another, but it wasn’t until I went on a sailing trip with my husband to Northport that I got the call from Four Way saying my book had been selected for the prize. The first person I texted was Keith Taylor.

Q: Birds, family, food, race, and history fill Pinion. What is the story that Pinion tells through poems?
A: Pinion is a biography of my family. It is the history of the Ricos. My whole life, I had wanted to write about my childhood and what it was like growing up as a mixed-race kid in a GM town. I wanted to write a book that would’ve saved me as a teenager.

Q: Pinion is rooted in Michigan, which has many GM towns. The poem “Citizenship of the Owl at General Motors” has the line, “Without sun Michigan sounds like Michoacán.” Another called “Poem in Consideration of My Death” starts out saying, “I will die on Sunday afternoon in Saginaw.” How and why does place so strongly infuse these poems?
A: I feel like Saginaw gets shit on a lot. It may not be the nicest place, but it is the place I feel safest and most familiar with. Ever since I started treatment, my memory is not as good. There are many things I have forgotten, but Saginaw is like a grid to me. It is in my code. I could drive down all the back roads with my best friend Laura and never get lost. It is home. And I felt like Saginaw deserved a little love. Not all its magic is gone.

Q: Let’s talk about the birds, too. How did you start writing about birds in your poems? When did you notice that birds are a theme in your work?
A: I have always been attracted to birds, probably because of my mother. I was entranced by her as a kid. I thought she was so beautiful, and she was so beautiful that even the birds noticed. When we would walk around the block, she would whistle to the male cardinal, and he would whistle back. I was in awe. Then, when I moved to Ann Arbor, I was a lonely dishwasher who couldn’t get published. I bought Stan Tekiela’s field guide to Michigan birds and started keeping track of when and where I saw each species. Who knew we had so many woodpeckers and they were all in my backyard? It brought back the magic of my mother. I began to identify birds by their song and really it felt like learning a new language. Then there was the robin. I never understood why she was our state bird, because she migrated, specifically to Mexico every winter. But then the strangest thing happened. I kept seeing the robin in the winter and not just one or two, but hordes of them. My mom didn’t believe me. She thought they were a sign of spring. This got me thinking about my grandmother and how she left Mexico at 19. Once I heard her singing in the kitchen, a pretty song, much like a robin. When I saw her as a robin, I couldn’t unsee it. I was hooked.

Q: In Pinion, owls work at General Motors, and several poem titles include a robin, such as “The Robin Who Turned to Snow,” which you describe in the previous answer. How do you go about matching the characteristics of birds to people?
A: It was intuitive. Birders talk about their spark bird, which is the bird that first piques their interest. For me, it was the great horned owl. My father told me a story. When he was little, a great horned owl used to roost outside his bedroom window at night and hoot. The owl seemed to be my father’s guardian. His father worked late and didn’t come home until almost morning. My father had a complicated childhood, and I liked to imagine his father transformed into an owl at night to check up on him. It was easy for me to imagine this because I never met my grandfather; he died before I was born, and I had never seen a great horned owl. They were both mythical to me.

Q: We would be remiss if we did not also talk about the food that appears throughout Pinion. “Sacrament” tells the anecdote of how “It took her years to learn how to make tamales, because my / grandmother was secretive and wouldn’t wait.” Food is as integral to Pinion as the birds. How do you see these two themes working together?
A: I’ve always cared deeply about food, even as a child. I hated going to friends’ houses because their parents were never as good of cooks as my mom. I invited everyone to my house for my mom’s chicken tacos, beef burritos, rice, and garbanzo soup. I am completely motivated by food and so are birds. The reason why robins stay in Michigan in the winter is because they have a food source. And of course, during many mating rituals, male birds try to impress the female birds with food. I like that. Bring me a hunk of dead animal. Ha, ha. I also went to culinary school, and while I was there, getting into the military routine of it all, I started writing a lot more than I had in the past. It was strange because I was so busy all the time and tired. But I kept jotting down lines here and there, and some of those things were turning into poems. I didn’t realize that becoming part of an assembly line would free my mind up to think about whatever I wanted to—so as I was decorating cakes, I would be thinking about what poem I was going to write on my break. I was very into forms and would practice a new one until I felt that I had “got it.”

Q: Pinion includes a type of poem called a golden shovel. One of your golden shovel poems, “Analog,” includes words from the Robert Frost poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” What draws you to this form?
A: The golden shovel is a fun form to pull you into a new place, like a remix of a song. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” is the first poem I memorized because of the movie The Outsiders, which I must’ve watched a hundred times. I remember the exact moment I was in the Hoyt Public Library, and I was looking through a poetry book and found the poem. I had no idea who Robert Frost was. I thought Pony Boy wrote it. One day, I was feeling these immense feelings. My cat was sick, and the vet thought he might be dying. It was during the beginning of the pandemic, and I was waiting in my car while she ran all these tests on him. I wrote the Frost poem down and then wrote toward it. It was a good way to cure my worried mind.

Q: What is on your stack to read?
A: I’m currently reading The Evolution of Beauty by Richard O. Prum and One Knee Equals Two Feet by John Madden. Over the summer I read and loved Bitch by Lucy Cooke, Becoming Wild by Carl Safina, and The Underworld by Susan Casey.

Q: Where are you going next with your writing?  
A: When I started cancer treatment, I couldn’t write. I wanted to, but I was so sick, and writing just made me too sad. The chemo was messing with my brain, and I didn’t like it. My thoughts felt tangible, like they were floating above my head like fog. I couldn’t grab them. Once I survived my first round of treatment, I looked in my computer and found all this stuff I had written and had no memory of doing so. Like breathing and digestion, I guess my body is on autopilot for poetry. Everything I write has the color of cancer on it. My treatment is my life now. At first, I wanted to push it away because I thought, there is no way anyone will publish this sad shit. But I kept doing it, because it made me happy, because it gave me something beautiful. Yesterday, I was reading about the argus pheasant and how hard it was for William Bebe to find one in the wild. And for me, all I have to do is a quick search on the internet to see the bird in all of his winged umbrella glory. The male displayed his feathers covered in pearls to the female. All the while poking out his blue head to see if she was looking. That’s my new book: beauty for the sake of beauty—and survival, of course.

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.