Catbird By Julia Marie Davis
Genre: Women’s Fiction, Current Affairs
With the immediacy of an op-ed and the narrative feel of a memoir, Catbird embodies the visceral response—angst and exasperating sense of helplessness inflamed by the distance between the will of the people and our national policy, and the bewilderment we feel—to the barbaric violence and violations of human rights happening in Ukraine. Set against the background of seasonal drama in the bird world, it has the sense of a fable, while still holding all the anxiety of the contemporary events we are living through, witnessing, mourning, and opposing.
Told in a series of micro-episodes, Davis channels the fears and fragility of the world order, mirroring the anxiety caused by a continual barrage of contemporary conflicts we are living through: witnessing, mourning, opposing. A simple and straightforward story on the surface, Catbird expresses untold angst and an exasperating sense of helplessness. This feeling is inflamed by the distance between the will of the people, evolving national policies, and the bewilderment we feel—to the barbaric violence and the violations of human rights unfolding not just in Ukraine but elsewhere around the world.
“Julia Davis’s Catbird is a lyric meditation on a wounded world, one where some of us are safe while horror and war ravage innocent women and children in a distant land. But are we safe? The narrator knows too keenly, and feels too sharply, to believe that we are. Davis writes viscerally and from the heart.” —Dinty W. Moore, author of The Mindful Writer
“Julia Davis’s Catbird is an urgent, meaningful meditation on war, power, and fragility of the world. It’s 2022 and the invasion of Ukraine has begun. From her place of relative safety, Eve reads of the bombings, the fleeing families and abandoned crops as she ponders the corrupt desire for absolute power and fears she is witnessing the beginnings of World War III. Woven throughout this witnessing are images of the birds she watches in the trees around her house, making tangible the fragility we share in this time when the possibility of invasion threatens us all.” —Karen Osborn, author of Centerville, Patchwork (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Between Earth and Sky, and The River Road
“As a woman of color cheering for those who wish to survive any and all wars against us I hope you read this book with the fear yet compassion it shares.” —nikki giovanni, New York Times best selling and Emmy-award nominated author of Bicycles: Love Poems (2009), The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection (2004), and Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose (2020)
Purchase on Amazon | Middle Creek Publishing | Bookbub | Goodreads
About the Author
Julia Marie Davis is an American poet and novelist. Julia’s writing has appeared in The Bangalore Review, The Dillydoun Review, New Note Poetry, Moonstone Arts Center’s Nasty Women’s Anthology , and TaintTaintTaint Literary Magazine. She holds a BA in English from Boston College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. Her novella, CATBIRD (2024, Middle Creek Publishing & Audio) weaves a fictional narrative with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, delivering a poignant lyrical message of hope and resilience in the face of global turmoil.
Connect with Julia on her Website | Facebook | Instagram | Amazon | Goodreads
