Accents Publishing is proud to present BIRDS OF THUNDER by Jessica D Thompson, a collection of poems about survival, transformation, and the hard-won freedom of becoming fully oneself. Moving through girlhood and womanhood, violence and grief, love and loss, Thompson turns again and again to the natural world—birds, rivers, trees, light—as a source of wisdom, refuge, and renewal. Fierce yet tender, Birds of Thunder is ultimately a book about finding one’s voice and discovering, after all that has been endured, the courage to rise.

Women populate the pages of Jessica D. Thompson’s Birds of Thunder—hurt women, lost women, brave women, and one woman, the poet herself, with the strength and compassion to hold them all, along with frost flowers, sycamores, a kettle of vultures, and “ghost horses with red manes.” Birds of Thunder picks you up by the scruff of the neck and will not let go.
— Pauletta Hansel, Cincinnati Poet Laureate emerita; author of Understory: A Women’s History of Appalachia

Jessica D. Thompson’s Birds of Thunder emerges from the shadows of domestic violence into the sanctuary of a woman discovering her agency. “Summon the crown fashioned from clover,” urges the speaker on this lyrical journey of insight, rendered with tenderness and precision. This poet conjures both the darkness of human nature, “… that which stirs beneath / the blunt blade of a shovel,” and the spirit of resilience, “… her heart ablaze, her laughter a bonfire.” Thompson is a poet of witness, one who sees transcendence in soaring vultures, carnival glass, prayer wheels, and a woman’s strength. Like the night heron, “we dive into the sea-tangled wrack weed, / searching for something lost.” With this poet as a guide, we willingly search.
— Ellen Austin-Li, author of Incidental Pollen, runner-up to Madville Publishing’s Arthur Smith Poetry Prize

The poems in Birds of Thunder paint the ancient danger of being a girl and a woman, and the recipient of men’s desires and angers. They paint loss and grief, recalibrating and starting over. They paint love. Full of intricate images and specificity, the poems connect us to the intersection where human, natural, and divine influence each other, and where time seems a closed book with the past, present, and future all singing at the same time.
— Melissa Jørgenrud Helton, author of A Middle-Aged Woman Rages

A sample poem and ordering information are at this link.