These poems probe the precincts of the heart, illuminating a self whose experiences mirror our own unspoken selves. Practicing ruthless honesty and boldness during this psychic journey, Katerina Stoykova generates emotional intensity through an unsparing dialogue with the self. She writes her way to truth, as one of her mentors instructed. These taut poems document the immigrant experience in an address to America that also affirms that each of us is an immigrant as we cross borders of love and self- appraisal to map our own boundaries. True to one of this collection's central images of itinerant birds and imaginative flight, these poems "perch on your palm and home there."
~Richard Taylor, author of Elkhorn: Evolution of a Kentucky Landscape
I love these poems, which are not only brilliant, tender and ironic, reckless and beautifully made, but a real kick in the pants, to boot. Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House manages to be a kind of memoir of the immigrant experience, a break-up letter and a love letter to America, and a deeply serious account of the longing for home rendered with the lightest of touches, with humor and grace and intelligence. This is one of the most original collections of poetry I've read in a long time, and one of the most delightful.
~Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem
There is much to love about the beautifully crafted and moving poems in Between a Bird Cage And a Bird House, especially the probing yet honest interrogation of the opportunity costs of the immigrant experience and a need to always reconjugate, reconstruct and ultimately return to some place recognizable as home.
~Frank X Walker, Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York
Katerina Stoykova is among America's most important talents. In her poems, I always find an exceptional voice that belongs to her alone. As I turn the pages through her dazzling new collection Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House, again and again and again, I find myself discovering something astonishing, necessary and new about a world I assumed I had long known.
~Kathleen Driskell, author of The Vine Temple
Culturally relevant. Candidly personal. And crafty in all the best ways. This is a book with a structure that balances real-life suffering with a convert's over-riding desire to believe in the future.... And yet, there is so much lightness in this collection. So much air and thrill and pleasure. Details of daily life collide with moments of reflection and remembrance of the long road she's taken.... Stoykova's book couldn't be more timely.
~Still: The Journal
The poems in Katerina Stoykova's Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House themselves pursue, and offer to the reader, understanding in the sense of rightly comprehending the nature or meaning of something, in this case what might be called the immigrant experience. But they also pursue, and offer to the reader, the richer sense of 'understanding,' the one that emphasizes empathy and mutuality.
~California Review of Books
In her latest book of poetry, Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House, Katerina Stoykova explores the beauty, heartache, and confusion of immigrant life in the US.
~Good River Review
The gains and losses of leaving Soviet-influenced Eastern Europe weigh heavily here. As for America, it flows throughout the contents, including a structural device of subtly pithy conversational exchanges. Opportunities that Stoykova might find in community, in relationships? She can cut their shortcomings to the quick with lines so narrow they seem to have been written through a seething squint. And all along, the observant reader can see how the surface accusations open doors to reveal a bravely shared self-interrogation.
~LEO Weekly
The overall tone of this collection is so confiding, so honest.... (A) carefully put together, intelligent book, in which America looms in various guises—friend, stranger, lover, confidant, distant entity who may or may not be listening. Some of the poems sound almost like prayers, some like conundrums written in a diary meant only for the writer to see: 'Everybody needs a pen/to scrawl what they can tell/everyone else but/that one person.' This book is an important addition to the literature of immigration.
~Pegasus
Stoykova portrays the immigrant identity in a touching, heartfelt fashion as she traverses the emotions and intensity of leaving behind pieces of oneself and one's old life for new beginnings while learning how to survive in different territory.... Stoykova's memoir-esque collection of poems is an eye-opening, enlightening examination of the immigrant identity and the subsequent struggle to find a place for yourself. She highlights the longing of one's roots and the sacrifice for a new start. Her poetry symbolically compares the immigrant feeling of being stuck between new beginnings and your native land to the freedom of living in a birdhouse or being confined within a birdcage. She reminds readers that they have the ability to spread their own wings and take flight.
~Hayden's Ferry Review