Candace Walsh is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Ohio University. She holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College. Recent/forthcoming publication credits include for poetry, Sinister Wisdom, Vagabond City Lit, and HAD; for fiction, The Greensboro Review, Passengers Journal, and Leon Literary Review; and for creative nonfiction, March Danceness, New Limestone Review, and Pigeon Pages. Her craft essays and book reviews have appeared in Brevity, descant, New Mexico Magazine, and Fiction Writers Review. She coedits Quarter After Eight literary journal. Find her on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @candacewalsh.

Queer love, so often mischaracterized, contains multitudes. The poems within Iridescent Pigeons represent it in romantic, maternal, filial, platonic, symbiotic, erotic, and sylvan modes. They also hold love and loss in cupped hands. We are mortal; so is love. We have life spans; so does love, whether measured in dog years, golden anniversaries, or the number of hours of a tryst that will expire at dawn. Amid the loss, retrieval and rebirth stir within the included poems that inhabit and annex traditional and endangered forms, such as a [William] Wordsworthian ode, an homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” a cento composed of phrases from Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and a triptych of Sapphic stanzas.