Catalogue d'oiseaux

Catalogue d’oiseaux recounts a year in the life of a couple separated by distance, carefully documenting time spent together and apart. When reunited, they embark on travels across the globe—from Toronto to Berlin, Porto to the Yukon. This expansive poem moves sensually through small, intimate spaces and the larger world alike. Traced through art, architecture, and the cultural life of various cities, this stunning celebration of love lives between geographies and chronologies as a kaleidoscopic gathering of the many fractals that make up a couple's life.

"Tucker’s elegant lines, each a marvel, like the finest of lenses, draw us into exact focus, remind us of why we cascade trip fall head over heels at all. Here within the immensities of love we experience ourselves, trees, birds, streets, buildings, worlds, as bodies in every heightened, intricate detail, anew. My pilot light is aflame." —Kirby, author of This is Where I Get Off

"Aaron Tucker's Catalogue d'oiseaux fractures Olivier Messiaen's music of the same name into poetic lenses through which to relive the past in a continuous and unfurling present. Nostalgia glows in romance, and is then activated through the vibrancy of art and the experience of bodies. This wondrous long poem creates a signature gesture of compound words, aligning the protagonists in their love and languagelove." —Klara du Plessis, author of Hell, Light, Flesh