The writing is hallucinatory, musical and intimate. It pulls you through, like the wind that blows through Bird’s life, like time rushing past us, unable to be held. There’s a sense that Holland’s sentences are alive, and that life starts here — with the stories we tell ourselves.
It is not the subject matter of Bird that is revolutionary...Nor is the structure of the story radical. What feels radical is the acute attention to language. It is this intensity that ultimately matters in the telling of this story, for it is what prohibits clichés of words or thoughts. In this sanctioned space that disallows the ease of the familiar, Bird is allowed to authentically be.
