March 2024. Click here to order!

In this “hybridiary” of historical fiction and personal memoir, we peer inside baby incubators at Coney Island, waiting for childhood to take wing. We overhear the dying dreams of the Imperial Romanov family, and we fret the simple act of watching a child walk to class. Hope is a bright and constant thread: a tornado cuts a tender swath; a lady bides time inside a tiger’s claws; teenagers preen on screens during pandemic lockdown. Rescues are fumbled but perpetually launched—and love is a gift the way the sun is a gift: constant and consoling, but also blinding, near-obliterating.

Tragic, funny, and surreal, FEATHER ROUSING nests in the spaces between caretaking and grief, secret and spectacle, recollection and imagination, global anguish and private joy. 

Selected as a finalist in the 2021 Black Lawrence Press Chapbook Competition.

Praise for Feather Rousing

This ineffable collection reads like sadness, like music, like poetry, like instinct, like mothers and children and the heart beating right out of your chest. I adored it!

—Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You

Rebecca Meacham has the uncanny knack of blending the historical with the metaphorical, the practical with the fantastic. Her flash explores the limits of the sky, her characters reaching their ultimate heights, even when perpetually grounded. A beautiful poetry has been woven through all these tales, the poetry of the human, which Meacham seems to understand, can bend to her will.

—Michael Czyzniejewski, author of The Amnesiac in the Maze: Stories

In this genre-blending chapbook of stories and essays, Meacham uses historical events to comment on what it means to be a mother, a daughter, and a wife amidst the uncertainties of our world. Beautifully written, this fable-like collection, full of delight and intrigue, explores what it means to live and love and survive.

—LaTanya McQueen, author of When the Reckoning Comes