Crowd Source - by Cecily Nicholson (Paperback)

About the Book

Crowd Source parallels the daily migration of crows who, aside from fledgling season, journey across metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. Alert to the great intelligence and perspective of corvid and non-human communications, these poems engage historical and strategic examples of how these songbirds gather and disperse. Continuing Nicholson's attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned with practising ecological futurities befitting corvid sensibilities.

Book Synopsis

Crowd Source parallels the daily migration of crows who, aside from fledgling season, journey across metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. Continuing Nicholson's attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned with practising ecological futurities befitting corvid sensibilities.

Review Quotes

"In thirteen movements, Cecily Nicholson's Crowd Source brings into focus the power of observation to trace the dance between wildlife and human habitation, the sky and the city, the crow and the poet. Highways and tributaries, street lights and feathers, obsidian eyes and freight ways, creeks and dumpsters--urban objects butting up against wild geography and crows, foreground Nicholson's unique and overwhelmingly inspiring vision of the way in which 'we are all in and of universe'. Nicholson's poetry shimmers with love."--2026 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award jury

"A modern, crow-focused epic." --Alison Manley, The Miramichi Reader

"Nicholson applies her capacious, multi-dimensional imagination to the covenly world of crows. Her language dances like light on water, moving from corvid facts to industrial history, from formal play to anti-colonial instruction, ever restless and shimmering. Nicholson employs mischief as a texture of movement, collective responsibility as a pathway to embodiment. This book is not meant to be just read, but practised." --The Grind

"Anyone who's ever marvelled at the twice-daily crow migration in Metro Vancouver will be enchanted by Crowd Source." --Sheri Radford, BC Living

"Crowd Source offers a fluid, graceful perspective on the importance of gathering, moving, and persisting." -- Alexandra Oliver, Literary Review of Canada

"Nicholson focuses her own lyric conversation ... through climate, colonialism, and urban crows ... her small points and moments accumulate across great distances, holding each moment in relation ... detailed and delicate ... fueled by research, observation, and study, but propelled by language." -- rob mclennan

"Nicholson's book delivers." - Heather Ramsay, The British Columbia Review