A Murmuration of Starlings elegizes the martyrs of the civil rights movement, whose names are inscribed on the stone table of the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Individually, Jake Adam York’s poems are elegies for individuals; collectively, they consider the violence of a racist culture and the determination to resist that racism. York follows Sun Ra, a Birmingham jazz musician whose response to racial violence was to secede from planet Earth, considers the testimony in the trial of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant for the murder of Emmet Till in 1955, and recreates events of Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Throughout the collection, an invasion of starlings images the racial hatred and bloodshed. While the 1950s spawned violence, the movement in the early 1960s transformed the language of brutality and turned the violence against the violent, says York. So, the starlings, first produced by violence, become instruments of resistance. York’s collection responds to and participates in recent movement s to find and punish the perpetrators of the crimes that defined the civil rights movement. A Murmuration of Starlings participates in the search for justice, satisfaction, and closure. “ A Murmuration of Starlings , is a fierce, beautiful, necessary book. Fearless in their reckoning, these poems resurrect contested histories and show us that the past—with its troubled beauty, its erasures, and its violence—weighs upon us all . . . a murmuration so that we don't forget, so that no one disappears into history.”— Natasha Trethewey , Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Native Guard “Through a ceremony of language and song, A Murmuration of Starlings consecrates and memorializes the souls, blood, and bones of those black men and women slaughtered on the altar of hate and violence during the Civil Rights era. With a lucid, shrewd intelligence and a commanding vision of healing and atonement, Jake Adam York makes an offering of images and music that seems the foundation of a new understanding and remembrance. A Murmuration of Starlings is a joyful experience and fulfillment of American verse from one of its most important young poets.”— Major Jackson , author of Leaving Saturn and Hoops “Each poem reaches out—as only poems can reach—and touches history on its shoulder. We may have thought we knew these stories. But, having been tapped by a homegrown kind of prodigal music—something double-edged, call it jazz—what turns to face us in these poems is turning toward us for the first time.”— Ed Pavlic , author of Labors Lost Left Unfinished and Paraph of Bone and Other Kinds of Blue I remember the bulletin: an Eastern Airlines commuter prop-jet had crashed into Boston Harbor after take-off from Logan Airport, less than ten miles from our house. I was ten years old. A little research shows that the date was October 4, 1960; the accident occurred around 5:45 p.m., and I would have been watching the six o’clock news with my grandfather before dinner. Most startling was the macabre fact that the plane had flown into a huge flock―a murmuration―of starlings, as many as ten thousand birds. Sixty-two passengers died, making this the worst aviation disaster caused by “bird strike.” More digging: the website This Day in the 1960s reports that another headline on that day was, “A new survey has found that Negroes are getting more higher-level federal jobs.” Jake Adam York begins his second book of poems, A Murmuration of Starlings , by immediately confronting its looming subject, the still fresh history of violence during the Civil Rights era. But it begins with an altogether different story. In 1890 an avid but naive naturalist named Eugene Schieffelin let loose sixty starlings in Central Park; the next year another forty were uncaged, also imported from Europe. Schieffelin’s goal (he had already introduced the house sparrow) was to make it possible for Americans to experience the types of birds mentioned by Shakespeare. “Shall Be Taught to Speak,” the opening poem, is titled after a line about a starling from Henry IV , Part One, and it concludes: A thousand miles away, in Arkansas, six men pose beneath a tree. In the photograph, the hanged man’s sweater’s buttoned tight, his hat, his head raked to hide the noose. One man stills the body with his cane. Another moves to point, but his arm is blurred. Trees burn quietly in the morning sun. Their jaws are set. Just one thing’s in motion. The thing in motion is a starling. It must be; otherwise the Schieffelin prelude has no purpose. But there is a second thing moving: the arm is blurred. Something dark, breeding, and uncontrollable has been set upon an undefiled continent. The starlings “swallow // all the country’s wandering songs / then speak their horrors from the eaves.” In a short endnote, York writes: A Murmuration of Starlings is part of an ongoing project to elegize and memorialize the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement, whose names are