Chauncey Walker, “Alum and author Claire Marie Stancek (English, Ph.D. 2018) shares the inspirations behind her book wyrd] bird.” UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science Author Spotlight, December 4, 2024.
In this interview, Claire Marie Stancek (English, Ph.D. 2018) shares the inspirations behind wyrd] bird, a deeply personal and experimental work that blends a diverse range of genres, including lyric essay, dream journal, poetry, and scrapbook. Written during a period of profound personal upheaval, the book engages with themes of grief, political turmoil, and the climate crisis, using hybrid forms to reflect the raw, open receptivity Stancek experienced during that time. Stancek reflects on her creative process, the role of embodiment in her work, and her evolving relationship with poetry, offering an intimate glimpse into the heart of her literary journey.
Burnside Soleil, “On Claire Marie Stancek’s wyrd] bird.” legible peculiar reviews, January 20, 2023.
The poet is witness, documentarian, participant, mystic, woman and more, but also caught like a “wire in the trees.”
“12 or 20 questions with Claire Marie Stancek.” rob mclennan’s blog, November 2, 2022.
“I write out of questions that I don’t know the answer to. To me, writing feels like asking, and asking again.”
Rob McLennan, “Claire Marie Stancek, wyrd] bird.” rob mclennan’s blog, February 4, 2022.
This really is a stunning collection, one that works a unique complexity and depth through such dark, amid the searching, stretching and attending.
Valentine Conaty, “Claire Marie Stancek.” Full Stop, November 10, 2021.
“wyrd] bird is a vulnerable, raw, open book that explores the susceptibility of reading.”
Sara Judy, “Make of this Language a Shrine: A Review of The Wheel and wyrd] bird.” Entropy Mag, October 5, 2021.
[wyrd] bird] is invested in language which only makes sense in the company of others, which is disinvested in the power of the individual lyric speaker, and fully committed to being in relationship to other people. Stancek [is] not [a] solitary figure[], rather, [she is] entangled in the world, and a chorus of voices speak to and through [her].
Tracy Zeman, “wyrd] bird.” Colorado Review, 2021.
At the heart of this dense, polyphonic, sonorous text is permeability and ambiguity about living, sensing and feeling, good and evil, and an underlying truth that all phenomena are to a degree overlapping and blurred. Broken chords layered on a “greengrey” “greygreen” world. Stancek’s work defies any easy categorization; it makes and unmakes, momentarily defines and then blends.
Rusty Morrison, “A brief interview with Claire Marie Stancek,” on wyrd] bird, originally published on Omnidawn.com, February 2020.
“wyrd] bird has a hybrid form that moves between fragmentary essay engaging with Hildegard of Bingen’s visionary writings and artwork, dream journal, poetry, grainy cellphone photos. This hybridity provided the medium by which I could engage with the subject matter—grief, climate catastrophe, political upheaval—and it also becomes an expression of this subject matter: shard-like, echoic, unmoored.”
Library Journal’s “some of the best work coming in 2020”
Don’t miss outrageously word-hungry Claire Marie Stancek’s wyrd] bird.
Kristina Marie Darling, “Voice, Alterity, & Appropriation: Recent Books by Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ming Holden, & Claire Marie Stancek.” The Literary Review, November 12, 2018.
Stancek . . . conjures through—and is conjured by—her accomplished and innovative approach to poetic craft.
Alexandra Mattraw, “Runes in the noise menagerie: A review of Claire Marie Stancek’s Oil Spell.” Jacket2, October 29, 2018.
It’s as if she asks: what would intersectional resistance against systemic violence look like if it was sung into poems? She answers with questions in the shape of polyphonic text, but her apocalyptic poetics are not without beauty.
In Oil Spell, form becomes a revolutionary act that deforms.
Perwana Nazif, “A (Non-Selective) Heard Violence: Interview with Poet Claire Marie Stancek.” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 24, 2018.
“I believe that poetic form is like that: cloudy with the past it carries, remaking by haunting, representing in dusty light whatever room or stanza it recasts with its own strange gleam.”
“Oil Spell.” Publisher’s Weekly, May 7, 2018.
Like a fiendish deejay, [Stancek] mixes the discourses of drone warfare, environmental crisis, English Romanticism, and American mass media culture to produce poems that thrum and careen across the page.
“On Apocalyptic Poetry: Brandon Brown and Claire Marie Stancek in Conversation.” Lithub, June 25, 2018.
“Mouths is interested in the expanded communities, the many-mouthed multitudes, human and inhuman, living and dead. It asks why certain voices are included and why others are excluded. I’m interested in undermining an academic version of citation and replacing it with citation governed by love.”
Lindsay Choi, “Poet, teacher Claire Stancek talks power of words, ‘Mouths.’” Daily Californian, February 12, 2015.
“She is unwilling to be frivolous or to regard anything as trivial—though she can be very witty, and she has an enormous capacity for delight,” wrote Stancek’s mentor Lyn Hejinian in an email to The Daily Californian. “She is gloomy about the future, but her writing is unnervingly beautiful.”