How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons): Poetry

By Barbara Kingsolver

"A gorgeous collection...These poems unplug from TV and social media and the outrage of the moment and turn our attention to the immediate and the everlasting, human intimacy and the power and mystery of nature." (Tampa Bay Times)

"Kingsolver brings her gifts of observation and reflection to HOW TO FLY...For a reader wanting to escape, to fly while grounded, this book is a map that offers surprise and delight." (BookPage)

In this intimate collection, the beloved author of The Poisonwood Bible and more than a dozen other New York Times bestsellers, winner or finalist for the Pulitzer and countless other prizes, now trains her eye on the everyday and the metaphysical in poems that are smartly crafted, emotionally rich, and luminous. 

In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with “how to” poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us. Some poems reflect on the redemptive powers of art and poetry itself; others consider where everything begins.

Closing the book are poems that celebrate natural wonders—birdsong and ghost-flowers, ruthless ants, clever shellfish, coral reefs, deadly deserts, and thousand-year-old beech trees—all speaking to the daring project of belonging to an untamed world beyond ourselves.

Altogether, these are poems about transcendence: finding breath and lightness in life and the everyday acts of living. It’s all terribly easy and, as the title suggests, not entirely possible. Or at least, it is never quite finished. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Sep 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9780062993144

Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955 and grew up in rural Kentucky. She earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and has worked as a freelance writer and author since 1985. At various times she has lived in England, France, and the Canary Islands, and has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia, Mexico, and South America. She spent two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to southwestern Virginia where she currently resides. Her books, in order of publication, are: The Bean Trees (1988), Homeland (1989), Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike (1989), Animal Dreams (1990), Another America (1992), Pigs in Heaven (1993), High Tide in Tucson (1995), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Prodigal Summer (2000), Small Wonder (2002), Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands, with photographer Annie Griffiths (2002), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007), The Lacuna (2009), Flight Behavior (2012), Unsheltered (2018), How To Fly (In 10,000 Easy Lessons) (2020), Demon Copperhead (2022), and coauthored with Lily Kingsolver, Coyote's Wild Home (2023). She served as editor for Best American Short Stories 2001.  Kingsolver was named one the most important writers of the 20th Century by Writers Digest, and in 2023 won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Demon Copperhead. In 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have been adopted into the core curriculum in high schools and colleges throughout the nation. Critical acclaim for her work includes multiple awards from the American Booksellers Association and the American Library Association, a James Beard award, two-time Oprah Book Club selection, and the national book award of South Africa, among others. She was awarded Britain's prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) for both Demon Copperhead and The Lacuna, making Kingsolver the first author in the history of the prize to win it twice. In 2011, Kingsolver was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has two daughters, Camille (born in 1987) and Lily (1996). She and her husband, Steven Hopp, live on a farm in southern Appalachia where they raise an extensive vegetable garden and Icelandic sheep. 

Book preview

1

How to Fly

How to Drink Water When There Is Wine

How to stay at this desk when the sun

is barefooting cartwheels over the grass—

How to step carefully on the path that pulls

for the fleet unfettered gait of a deer—

How to go home when the wood thrush

is promising the drunk liquid bliss of dusk—

How to resist the kiss, the body forbidden

that plucks the long vibrating string of want—

How to drink water when there is wine—

Once I knew all these brick-shaped things, took them

for the currency of survival.

Now I have lived long and I know better.

How to Have a Child

Begin on the day you decide

you are fit

to carry on.

Begin with a quailing heart

for here you stand

on the fault line.

Begin if you can at the beginning.

Begin with your mother,

with her grandfather,

the ones before him.

Think of their hands, all of them:

firm on the plow, the cradle,

the rifle butt, the razor strop;

trembling on the telegram,

the cheek of a lover,

the fact of a door.

Everything that can wreck a life

has been done before,

done to you, even. That’s all

inside you now.

Half of it you won’t think of.

The rest you wouldn’t dream of.

Go on.

How to Cure Sweet Potatoes

Dig them after the first light frost. Lay them

down in a shallow tray like cordwood,

like orphans in a dresser drawer. Cover them

with damp towels. Bring up the heat. In a

closet or spare room, you’ll want it hotter

than the worst summer day you remember

and that humid. A week of this will thicken

their skins, make them last for months

in your cellar, and turn all their starch to sugar.

Bear in mind this is not a cure for anything

that was wrong with the sweet potato

that meant to be starchy, thanks, the better

to weather a winter in cold clay, then lean on its toes

and throw out reckless tendrils into one more spring.

Bear in mind also the ways that you were once

induced to last through the sermon, the meal,

the insufferable adult conversation, all the times

you wanted to be starchy but were made to be sweet.

Recall this surrender when you sit down to eat them.

Consider the direction of your grace.

How to Shear a Sheep

Walk to the barn

before dawn.

Take off your clothes.

Cast everything

on the ground:

your nylon jacket,

wool socks, and all.

Throw away

the cutting tools,

the shears that bite

like teeth at the skin

when hooves flail

and your elbow

comes up hard

under a panting throat:

no more of that.

Sing to them instead.

Stand naked

in the morning

with your entreaty.

Ask them to come,

lay down their wool

for love.

That should work.

It doesn’t.

How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)

Behold your body as water

and mineral worth, the selfsame

water that soon (from a tree’s

way of thinking, soon) will be

lifted through the elevator hearts

of a forest, returned to the sun

in a leaf-eyed gaze. And the rest!

All wordless leavings, the perfect

bonewhite ash of you: light

as snowflakes, falling on updrafts

toward the unbodied breath of a bird.

Behold your elements reassembled

as pieces of sky, ascending

without regret, for you’ve been lucky

enough. Fallen for the last time into

a slump, the wrong crowd, love.

You’ve made the best deal.

You summitted the mountain

or you didn’t. Anything left undone

you can slip like a cloth bag of marbles

into the hands of a child

who will be none the wiser.

Imagine your joy on rising.

Repeat as necessary.

How to Give Thanks for a Broken Leg

Thank your stars that at least your bones

know how to knit, two sticks at work:

tibia, fibula, ribbed scarf as long as a winter.

The mindless tasks a body learns when it must.

Praise your claw-foot tub. Tie a sheet around its belly

like a saddle on a pig, to hammock your dry-docked

limb while the rest of you steeps. Sunk deep

in hot water up to your chin, dream of the troubles

you had, when trouble was still yours to make.

The doctor says eight weeks. Spend seven here.

Be glad for your cast that draws children with

permanent markers, like vandals and their graffiti

to the blighted parts of town. They mark out

their loves and territories, and you, the benevolent

mayor, will wear these concerns in public,

then throw them away when your term is up.

Concede your debt to life’s grammar, even as

it nailed you in one fell stroke from subject to object.

Praise the helping verbs, family hands that feed;

the surgical modifiers that pin you from shattered

to fixed to mended. Praise the careless syntax

of a life where, through steady misuse, a noun

grows feet: it turtles and outfoxes and one day,

with no one watching, steps out as a

Reviews for How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)

[castlelass · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This poetry collection encompasses a wide variety of subjects – the author’s family history, world travels, nature, relationships, friendship, death, literature, knitting, and much more. The poems are organized by theme. My primary poetry readings are the classics of the 19th century. I do not read contemporary poetry on a regular basis so I may not be the best judge of its quality. It was not a bad reading experience, but nothing really stood out for me.

[hemlokgang · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What a lovely poetry collection! Many of Kingsolver's poems bring newly layered meaning to everyday events. I particularly responded to her poem about knitting/sheep shearing and her love poem. I walk away with a renewed desire to pause in my life, to examine my world, and to love. Kingsolver uses language so very beautifully, that I reread many passages out loud to myself, just to enjoy her luscious phrasing to my heart's content. Her poetry relaxed me and just plain spoke to me. Very pleased!

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Poetry, lives lived, lessons learned. Some like letters, some shorter, all wonderful. How to be married, how to be divorced, have a child, even one on knitting. A short tour of Italy, when she takes her mother in law there to visit her childhood home.There are two, however, that stood out for me. How to be hopeful. Much needed, for many besides myself, I believe. I adored this line, "Sometimes you have to stand on an incline where things look possible."These last two lines in "The forests of Antarctica" gave me chills."You are the world that stirs.This is the world that waits."ARC from edelweiss.