Crowd Source by Cecily Nicholson | The Miramichi Reader

these birds are not dying
they refuse to die

refuse to leave this plane (p. 6)

I’m drawn to poetry which tries to make sense of the world we live in through nature – whether it’s because we’ve strayed too far from nature, whether we’ve lost our love of nature, or some other reason, we come back to nature to make sense of whatever’s happened to us. In Crowd Source, Cecily Nicholson’s latest collection of poetry, she uses a flock of crows as her framing device, linking meditations on a wide variety of topics with the movement of crows. Broken into thirteen sections, dotted with epigraphs from a variety of writers and thinkers, Crowd Source explores the way nature butts up against the world we have carved out for ourselves, and illustrates how we’re all still connected, in spite of human efforts.

blackberry perimeters
in some instances
keep bears off a lot
some birds are happy (p. 94)

The way that Nicholson constructed Crowd Source made it feel more like a continuous story, rather than a set of related poems. Like a modern, crow-focused epic. Each poem moves beautifully into the next one, while the sections read more like chapters, a story of crows and people and the environment and the violence we visit upon one another all in one story. Because of this structure, I think that this is a really accessible poetry volume, particularly for people who are nervous about getting into poetry and could use something familiar, like an overarching story and chapters.

too
the birds know
more than I can imagine
it is a sweet pastime
to try and empathize (p. 79)

Crowd Source is a really interesting work. The natural world and the world humans have created bashing up against one another – sometimes in beautiful, affirming ways, and others which are uglier and cruel, and Nicholson catches these in all their complexity in her lines. I appreciated the reflection this poetry volume led me to, and again, was reminded of the majesty of crows.

to see ultraviolet majesty mystery
from the roadside hopping
into traffic to nab food (p. 121)

Cecily Nicholson is the author of five books, including From the Poplars, recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and Wayside Sang, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. Her collaborative practice spans municipal, artist-run centres, and community-based arts organizing, education, and advocacy. She is an assistant professor at the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and the 2024/2025 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley.

Publisher: Talonbooks (April 15, 2025)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 130 pages
ISBN: 9781772016581

Alison Manley

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Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.