Marjolein van der Loo’s reader A Tree has been among our bestselling books over the last 18 month. With a Bird is a new reader the invites us into an even more expansive, cross-disciplinary conversation, this time about how we live with and think alongside birds. In a time of climate breakdown and ecological grief, her new book offers birds not as metaphors or curiosities, but as kin-creatures with their own histories, desires and forms of knowing.
Spanning speculative fiction, ancestral memory, critical ornithology, personal essay and visual art, its contributions explore the fragile, often overlooked relationships between humans and birds across myth, science, migration and dream. Through listening and attention, the book explores how birds shape landscapes, signal planetary change and offer new ways of understanding time, voice and relation. Contributors draw on decolonial, feminist and ecological practices to unsettle dominant narratives and invite forms of care, reciprocity and repair. From the mimicry of the lyrebird to the silence of vanished species, from winter dreaming to co-domestication and spectral presence, each chapter gestures toward multispecies futures grounded in presence and poetic attention.
This reader, both a continuation of an exhibition and a gathering of distinct voices, becomes a spell – woven from memory, sound, and image – that reimagines kinship in flight.
