In Bird Missing from One Shoulder, Linda Annas Ferguson has written a poetry collection that movingly renders the beauty and sadness of life’s transience. The poems about her father’s life and death are especially impressive, for they depict not only an individual life but also a way of life now vanished from the Southern landscape.    ----   RON RASH, author of Eureka Mill and Saints at the River

Linda Ferguson’s elegiac poems about her father and mother, both of whom worked in textile mills, capture the lives of a dying generation of southern laborers. They came from the farms and hills to the small towns, married and raised their children, and worked loyally at their jobs until the jobs were no more. When her father returns from his last night on the graveyard shift, “white lint clinging to his hair / like a disintegrated halo,” we celebrate the unsung heroism of these men and women whom Ferguson depicts with the love of a daughter and the sure hand of a mature poet.” --- R.S. GWYNN, author of No Word of Farewell

Reading Linda Annas Ferguson’s poems is like watching a good documentary. I believe what I see: real images, real memories. And I believe in this poet’s commitment to preserving the truth--however hard or bleak--about her parents’ lives, her personal history.  I am moved by the intimacy of these poems. --DAVID TRINIDAD, author of Plasticville and The Late Show

The narrative spell of this book is as strong as that of a good novel, allowing us to enter the life of a Southern, cotton mill family and experience its warmth and difficult struggles head-on. Ferguson’s work is both tender and fearless. Bird Missing from One Shoulder contains poems about death, but also about the small, happy moments of one family’s day-to-day life. It is sprinkled with surprising and original tidbits. “I could still smell the boy in you,” the poet tells us in “First Kiss.”   PATRICIA GRAY,  author of Rupture,  Red Hen Press