Review
Title: Birds to Bones: Writings on Grief, Gender, Mormonism, & Magic
Author: Aisling Rowan
Publisher: BCC Press
Genre: Personal essays / poetry
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 89
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-9986052-9-6
Price: $9.95
Reviewed by Christian Anderson for the Association of Mormon Letters
In his introduction to this genre-bending collection, Ash Rowan (they/him) notes that in Mormonism, names are sacred, and they chose two names for the same alpine tree following trans-masculine surgery to reflect the ability to grow and thrive in challenging environments. There follows just under 100 pages of concise poetry, essays, journal entries, paintings, and short fiction (the longest of which clocks in at under 1,700 words), each illustrating in playful, painful ways what growth and thriving in liminal spaces is like in a black-and-white culture. You can read every word in the volume in 30 minutes, but you find yourself drawn into his perspective so effortlessly you don’t even realize it’s happened until days later, you find yourself watching birds flit by and think, “Father, Mother, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
This “archaeology of the soul” proceeds non-chronologically despite stratigraphic metaphors, a decision that is initially jarring but produces a you’ve-always-known-this effect in later reflection, as if you are recalling your own experiences instead of the author’s. Rowan has already introduced his work on AML, where they explain his motivation and structural decisions. Like Rowan, I find that Mormons do grief poorly; having lost both parents in the last five years, I find that we are all-too eager to comfort those who mourn with heavy foods and light platitudes, even if that is neither what the bereaved needs nor what we covenanted to do.
Drawing on his own experience of losing two siblings in childhood, Rowan describes the isolating effects of poor collective mourning. I’m familiar with the feeling of “swallowing back tears that would / help no one but me” (from “It hurt me too”) and “Googling `How do I know if I’m de-/pressed.’ Meanwhile, you’re becoming com-/pressed from all sides” (from “Geological Processes”). Just this recognition of fellow feeling would have been worth the sticker price to my hurt soul, but Rowan goes on to find meaning in the pain in ways that appeal to my physics-trained mind. In his hurt, they find confirmation of a Creator, “It explains why something so fragile [as a human] works at all; / the immense forces this delicate system can pull through / without breaking are its own testament” (from “I Am a Cosmos”). The renewing cycle of death and birth “strikes me as hopeful and romantic amidst the morbid and macabre…. Something or someone else gets a turn to use these atoms” (from “Thinking Gravely”).
However, one thing Mormons do even worse than grief is tolerate change from one category to, not the other, but something between the two. Though I have some experience living on the inside edge of orthodoxy, Rowan’s experiences as an autistic, non-binary, transsexual create perspectives I didn’t know existed, much less consider. As a person who has given birth twice but also has undergone transmasculine surgery, Rowan’s longing for a specifically feminine God is as surprising as it is poignant, especially when in “Heavenly Mother is Packing a Suitcase” for the author to go to mortality as if it were summer camp, or—in the longest work in the anthology, the Olivia-Butler-esque “Stewards of the Lifewater”—when the elder/mentor Immah (Hebrew for Mama) talks a junior premortal intelligence through the separation from Godbody and entrance into the mess of physicality.
Occupying this liminal space is exhausting; Rowan testifies, “There are Heavenly Parents who love us, no matter the Sunday,” in the same breath admitting a temporary spiritual defeat: “Maybe next week I’ll make it to church. Maybe I’ll at least catch the sun as it sets.” (“No Matter the Sunday”) They describe going to the temple for the last time and catching a glimpse of themself in a dress. “My spirit slipped two feet to the left while the physical realm lurched sideways. I clambered to get the fabric off me as if it was burning into my skin…My reflection and I could [then] meet each other’s eyes again.” (from “Prayer in the Celestial Sanctuary of the Mountain”) But if the social aspects of this liminal space are isolating, Rowan eventually finds his way back to integration. Abandoning “the neurotypical, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender archetype I’d been conned into cosplaying” (from “How to Survive at Sea”) they instead embrace exploration into the areas between binaries, and instead of grey discovers color: “We exist in, and on, a spectrum of infinite chromatics” (from “G(radiance)”).
In my own research as a mathematical physicist, I spend a lot of time thinking about hypercubes, which is what happens when you continue the progression from point to line to square to cube on into higher dimensions. Experiencing Aisling Rowan’s artistic depictions of his journey makes me realize that I’ve spent a lot of time considering spirituality from the many corners of the identity hypercube (with axes like male/female, gay/straight, cis/trans, autistic/allistic, etc) until those perspectives have become familiar, if not stale. But hypercubes don’t just have corners: they have hypervolumes, and Rowan is my first exposure to someone exploring this complex middle ground. Why not let Rowan help you step off the axes into this place where old things are continually become new when seen from a place you never thought of? You will find him an excellent guide, with the wisdom that comes only from tough and well-considered personal experiences.