Written in the years after returning home to South Texas, The Bird Church tends to the urban microfauna-the grackles, koi, chicharras, cosmos, feral parrots, snoutnosed butterflies, but also the ornamental fruit and children-which persist in the unsupervised scars of highways and inland refineries. Less a poetry of witness than of attention, The Bird Church considers "what is here" the ordinary life that persists and survives amid the occupations of colonial history and its current climate and political crises.