Debunking some common arguments about how I picked the wrong taxon for "hawks" on my stupid meme post about how there is no taxonomic category called a "hawk"
"Only Accipitriformes in genus Accipiter are hawks, taxon purist is wrong"
"Only Accipitriformes in the subfamily Accipitrinae are hawks, taxon purist is wrong"
"Buzzard is used to refer to Accipitriformes in the genus Buteo, so they arent hawks. Taxon purist is wrong"
I now feel justified in hating this Fucker [top] who steals all the birdseed from our feeders, now that I know he is an Eastern Gray Squirrel--an invasive species in our area--who have been damaging habitats and pushing out our indigenous Douglas Squirrels like this Cutie [bottom] who came to visit us yesterday.
I now feel justified in hating this Fucker [top] who steals all the birdseed from our feeders, now that I know he is an Eastern Gray Squirrel--an invasive species in our area--who have been damaging habitats and pushing out our indigenous Douglas Squirrels like this Cutie [bottom] who came to visit us yesterday.
My name is Never Angeline North aka Sara I write books of weird trans lit, but this blog isn't about that. This blog is about birds.
I have a birding blog for anyone who likes birding and/or blogs. It's just pictures and photos and me talking about birding and some stuff about my life and background.
you've all seen Listers, right? the self-published youtube documentary? about writing down the birds that you look at?
it's subtitled "A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching," an inaccurately voyeuristic title, because the glimpse is at Themselves.
two unemployed brothers (one an unemployed videographer, one nonspecifically unemployed who has a ferocious new interest in birds) decide: firstly, they are now birders. secondly, to start their birding adventure in a maximalist way by doing A For-Real Big Year.
what's a Big Year? they don't know, they just heard of it now. oh, what's that? they're going and seeing the greatest number of birds from Jan 1 to Dec 31 in the lower 48 by way of their shitass van. they also have about my own exact knowledge of birds, which is: there are bald eagles, great blue herons, crows, and a lot of small brown birds which are all called "sparrows."
a youtube comment correctly remarks that it's like watching oldschool skating videos, where you got maybe 480p of the finally-stomped kickflip down the stairwell, but the joy isn't in that, it's of the camera following the guy as he jumps into the bushes with three cheering friends. they are uniquely new to birding AND uniquely good at cinematography.
the documentary works because These Guys Love Birds. they love birds so much. they are signing up to rare-bird-sighting email lists. they are taking hour-long detours to find a kind of grackle that they later learn lives in every single gas station dumpster they've passed. they're interviewing just about everyone they come across, from award-winning birders to a guy walking down a freeway. they have an instinct for jon bois style stupid-but-emotional bits—they are calling every defunct bird hotline in old birding guides to see if any of them can give them a tip about a local bird; or to see if any of them are still connected at all. they are making fun of quails.
this all works WELL. it is beautiful wildlife cinematography cut with handheld camcorder-quality ski bum video. it is what documentary is for.
so. not to doxx myself (i've talked about this here before though) but i live in Kansas. and my license was just revoked very suddenly and immediately because i'm trans and had changed my gender marker.
so now i cannot legally drive or vote until/unless i let them force me to carry around a card that misgenders me and outs me as trans, because i certainly don't look female anymore.
so hey if you have the means and want to help with any of this, please consider donating to the ACLU of Kansas because they are at least going to try to do something to push back against this, and i'm such a panicky wreck that the only thing i can do to get through my immediate gut reaction to having my license revoked tonight (i cannot stress enough that i received the letter today saying that my license is no longer valid tomorrow) is focus on the fact that there's at least one entity trying to protect me and my fellow trans kansans.
Rainbear!!!!!!!!! is the story of a woman who lives in a coffee shop where she makes a job out of loving people while inventing worlds in her dreams. The coffee shop is staffed by a barista-cum-border-guard who people show up to stab every week. Later, the narrative channels 18th century Jewish folktales as she is told a bedtime story about two queer lovers, who are themselves then told a dreamlike, quasi-erotic tale of a pagan prophet without a home. In this way, narratives eat each other and turn inside out as stories are found within stories and new adventures are told by unexpected rainbow bears that are also mountains and pages of journals are found papered inside the nests of vomitbirds.
Mod opinion: I haven't read this book yet, but it sounds really interesting, I'm hoping to check it out sometime.
Bez Reviews Independent Books #10: Black Hole Science Is Filled with Apologies
Hey everyone! I wanna do little reviews/writeups for the independently-published books I find on itch.io, and so, here I am. I want to review one book every month or two (or quicker, if I’m lucky); it’ll get me reading more, and get authors who often go without feedback some thoughts on their work! I think it’ll be cool for everyone!
If you want your book reviewed, the only requirement I have is that it’s hosted on itch.io. Even if itch is just one of many places you can get the book, I want to review books that have a home there at least. Feel free to get in touch with me with your books—I’m @NorbezJones on Twitter (I refuse to call it X), Bluesky, Pillowfort, Threads, Instagram, Tumblr, and Discord.
Looking forward to seeing your books! <3
__________
Warning: the following review lightly touches on adult themes, mainly nudity & sex, and also discusses transness, gender, & death (both animal & human). Also, some mild elements of body horror. All of this is described with poetic language and is not graphic, but still, reader discretion is advised.
This is my 10th review for Bez Reviews Independent Books! Thank you all so much for reading and supporting me. I appreciate it a lot! <3
I’m subscribed to publisher tRaum Books on Patreon, so when they published their first poetry collection, I received the announcement post in my inbox. After some thought, I decided to sign up for an ARC review copy on Book Sirens, and here we are! I am writing this review to share my honest thoughts, and I was not compensated for it.
The book is Black Hole Science Is Filled with Apologies by Never Angeline Nørth, and the collection is described like this in the announcement:
North's collection is called Black Hole Science Is Filled with Apologies, and the poems are divided into five sections. The writing starts in a more traditional format, then slips into mini fairy-tales about moles leading their own secret and adventurous lives and even veers into interviews (the very last section, Woe, which has some of my favorite pieces from the entire book). I know North's writing isn't for everyone, which is why it's special and why I know it will connect with some of you. <3 It's short, confessional, earnest, pretty, very trans, and sometimes jarringly uncomfortable. I love all of it, even when I am going, yeeeesh.
After reading it, I definitely agree that it’s definitely a hodgepodge of various writing styles. Most of it is free verse poetry, but there’s also different types of prose mixed in there too. The Afterward also clarifies where each section comes from—some of the works here are from the mid-2010s, while others (like the aforementioned Woe) was released as recently as last year.
Poetry makes for a great medium to explore the casually horrible things of life, and Nørth takes full advantage of that. The opening prose poem, “Nailed to the sky”, sets the tone immediately by setting the narrator up as a black hole scientist (this is where the title comes from) who screams so loud that people in her bed literally drown in those screams and die. The narrator is then sent invitations to the funeral of the two deceased people, but once she gets there, “I realize that it is the kind of invitation that everyone hoped I would ignore.” She tries to think about black hole science instead, but, “My every movement is screaming. The screams fill the room.” Oh, and she also has giant breasts that “just showed up one day”, telling us that not only will themes like death and sex be involved in these poems (why else would five people have been in the black hole scientist’s bed?) but also that Nørth will use the poetic form to explore gender as well. (Nørth is a trans woman.)
After this strong opening, however, the rest of Part 1—titled Children of Stars & Information—doesn’t pack as strong as a punch. “Nailed to the sky” is followed by “A river walks on nineteen legs”, a story about prophets written like a biblical passage or folk tale. Nørth, who is Jewish, says in the Afterward that it was “my attempt to emulate Talmudic Aggadah [basically, Jewish folklore, from what I understand], usually featuring sages as characters. I specifically was trying to emulate some of the quirks that come into it in English translation.” I admire the effort, but it’s a confusing tonal shift—we go out of a prose piece that treated death with seriousness, into one that makes it into a punchline of a prophet’s pain. Perhaps it’s appropriate? Also, I won’t be going over every single poem in this book, but I did want to note these two as the opener and processor; they are two very different pieces, and putting them next to each other was a bit confusing to me.
Other notable poems of Part 1 includes “Notes on leaving you”, which I mention because I am very split on it. It is an extremely redundant poem, and that it the point of it—it repeats the same words in succession over & over until they tangle into each other and lose all meaning. Here’s a sample:
After I left the room I don’t know what happened I the room. I know what happened to me after I left the room but I don’t know what happened to you. I hope you tell me some day. I hope that someday you tell me what happened after I left the room. I hope that some day after today (today’s when I left the room) you tell me what happened.
It’s all one long paragraph, and I will admit the repetition does grate on me. I know it’s intentional, but I struggle to like it. It’s trying to slow down a moment in time, show how the narrator is going over a single moment over & over in her head, but I think there were better ways to portray that.
There are also multiple poems in Part 1 that are given what appear to be throwaway titles. “Peom”, “Poem (for myself)”, “Pome”, and “Trans poem” surely could have been given proper names before publication. I don’t understand why they are titled the way they are. Which is a shame, because I really like these pieces. I especially liked “Peom”:
Trans writing is about the body
but my body is an inane thing
lumpy, full of coughs and promises
wildcard energy, dickles & shouting
WHY THIS when they’re lawying at us
filling their mouths with sawdust
and spitting.
“Glow” is another poem with constant repetition within its pages, and confirm my theory that Nørth uses repetition to go over moments in time, revisit them over & over again. It opens with, “In the second part of my life, I am living in a graveyard made of the first part of my life,” and from there, we’re treated to a Inception-esque mindfuck where the narrator compares different parts of her life—from what they were made of to how they affected her. Like in poems like “Notes on leaving you”, a clear “you” is mentioned here, with the first/fourth (it’s complicated) part of the narrator’s life being labeled as, “the time when I knew you . . . the time when you knew me.” Death is once again a topic here, which starts with the mention of the graveyard in the opener, and goes deeper later on with these lines:
The third and fourth parts of my life were not a graveyard or anything. The fourth part of my life held
its breath with anticipation and the third part of my life exhaled thick smoke with a bellow, a cough,
a breath weapon. I never wanted to be a breath weapon until I was partially a breath weapon.
I stopped wanting to be a breath weapon when I saw the dead lying in front of me killed, dressed
up like enemies, but with simple organs, still moving inside their bodies like hurt earthworms.
Reading this poem reminded me of listening to a Newgrounds Death Rugby song, hearing the same electric guitar chords over & over with different, hard-hitting lyrics over them. The repetition worked much better here, in my opinion, and the poem made me reflective on the different parts of my own life.
Part 2 is Beautiful Mole-Men Adventures, and these pieces read like dreamy fairy tales you’d read to a child before bed, except mixed with topics like gender & what it means to be a people. Reading these, you get the feeling that even if bad things happen to the Mole-People on one page, they’ll be just fine by the end of the story. Like in Part 1, the poetic way the prose is written makes the impossible possible, and we see that in the three-dimensional tattoos, haunting music coming out of wounds, and crying tears that form emergency vehicles/buildings. I especially like how that last one is written:
One of them was trying big crocodile tears & her tears turned into gold on her cheeks, & there was a steady rhythm of tear-thumps as they hit the ground. The other was crying tiny hospitals from one eye, and even tinier ambulances from the other. Rrraaaaaooooorr-raaaooo. The ambulances drove down her cheek, lights flashing, desperately looking for the hospitals. One by one they made up on the floor, in the space between the lighthouse-dweller’s spread legs. Just in time, the brave mole-man whispered to himself over & over, just in time.
Like in Part 1, I wish there were more creative titles here. The majority of these are dubbed “Beautiful mole-men adventures”. I did like how the titles change after it’s brought up that that mole-men weren’t just male and didn’t all want to be called mole-men—from then on, the titles are the same formula, but reflect this change, such as “Beautiful mole-book adventures”. Again, I see the purpose of the repetition, but even so, I would have liked to see better titling here.
Part 2 is where “Sara” is introduced, at the end of “Beautiful whatever adventures”. Sara is a reoccurring figure in these poems, and is, in fact, Nørth’s previous pseudonym. Not a deadname, to be clear—Nørth used to publish work under the name Sara (June) Woods. As some of these works were published in the 2010s, this name comes up in the works from that time. What makes Part 2 interesting about it is this note from the Afterward:
Beautiful Mole-Men Adventures was originally published in 2012 or 2013 as part of an e-chapbook by Pangur Ban Party. This was before I came out as a trans woman in early 2014. I made a few edits because there were some hints at my future gender-ness that I wanted to tease out a bit more.
I’m going to assume the name that was there before Sara was Nørth’s deadname, and it was changed to Sara to better reflect Nørth’s true gender? Or maybe Nørth made the character Sara here in 2012 or 2013, and decided to adopt the name later? I hope it’s the latter, because deadnames are never fun. Either way, when I refer to Sara, I am referring to the character of Sara that Nørth has made in these poems.
Part 3 is Yr Various Hairlessness. Nørth says the following about it in the Afterward:
Yr Various Hairlessness was originally salf-published as a chapbook in 2014, based on my favorite of the custom poems I sold for $10 a piece on my tumblr to raise money for laser hair removal. I had recently quit my job to move in with one suitcase from Chicago to Portland, OR. I was sleeping on poets’ couches at the time, no job to speak of, and came up with this as a way to start transition while broke. I sold around 30-40 of these and spent all the money on two overpriced laser hair removal sessions that didn’t work. I got depressed and wasn’t able to pay anyone back or write the poems. I apologized, but lost some friends in the process. I abbreviated the names to initials just because it’s been a long time and I have a feeling some of the people might be going by something different now, but have no way to find out.
Each poem is titled to a different hairless person, and titled as such, from “Dear Hairless R,” to “Rain-Car Letter for E.C. (Dear Hairless E,)”. All of them are signed off by Sara. I’m assuming this is because Sara was Nørth’s name at the time, and to sign them off otherwise would remove the time capsule aspect of these poems—they were made for & surround a particular period of her life. Again, the theme of going over points in time comes up.
Dogs come up a lot in Part 3. In the first poem to Hairless R, Sara tells a story about two dogs who live with their owners, and then the dogs die, and the owner gets two more dogs; she reveals, “I am the third dog & you/are one of the owners./Thank you for buying me.” In the poem to Hairless I, Sara says, “My experience of the world/is both the name I gave/to my dog & the thing/I am always figuring out,/just to learn it has shifted.” To Hairless N, Sara describes a dream where she was “inside the beating/chest of a dog, a healthy one” and that night, her dog in real life died, but inside the corpse was found “a tiny person./A little me.” This is just a small sampling of the canines within this part. Lots of dogs, so many dogs, all of the dogs you could want and more.
Dogs as obedient creatures who trust us to care for them, beings we’ve domesticated to rely on us. Sara equates herself dogs in various poems—in addition to the ones mentioned above, Sara tells Hairless A she appreciated a dog Hairless A brought, and the dog birthed ghosts that slipped into Sara’s skin, which may be writing the poem/letter as they speak. Sara is a dog, or is possessed/haunted by them; they are one and the same.
In a later poem to Hairless A, Sara mentions ten dogs who worked well together, but were impossible to train individually. She resolves this conundrum thusly:
It wasn’t until I really
put my money down
on the sidewalk &
watched it blow away
that I understood what
a dog was and how we try
to understand them through
sacrifice, without ever knowing
what it actually feels like as a
thing to do intentionally.
When Nørth mentions Sara “put my money down/on the sidewalk &/watched it blow away”, I don’t know if it’s meant to say that Sara (within the story of the poem) wasted money on dog trainers who didn’t help, or she performed a meditative exercise in which she watched her hard-earned poetry dollars blow away in the breeze. Or maybe it’s referring to how the laser hair removal treatment was, in the end, a waste of money that didn’t work. Regardless, this is one of the “casual dog encounters” Sara mentions in the poems, which is a funny way to put it because her dog encounters are anything but casual, if you ask me.
Part 4 is Lives Of The Saints, and was originally written between 2012 and 2014 as Nørth’s part of a collab with author James Tadd. Nørth would assign saints to Tadd as inspiration to write a piece, and he would do the same for her. Nørth writes in the Afterward, “It was particularly fun because neither of us were raised Catholic, but both of us find Catholicism (morbidly) fascinating.” It opens a piece based on Saint Agatha of Sicily, in which the narrator get up at 4am, accidently gets ashes on her left breast, and finds satisfaction in pealing off the stain & skin of that area until there’s nothing left. A real tone-setter, that!
The pieces all seem to be based on dreams, or at least inspired by the dreamspace/dream logic, like Parts 1 & 2. My favorite one is “St. John the Baptist”, which brings back tunnels from the mole-people stories, and screaming from the opening poem. The narrator specifies she didn’t cry, she screamed, for hours straight, which troubles her wife and psychiatrist. Eventually, she stops being able to find things in the dark until she can’t find her hands, her wife, or (presumably) herself.
I like the one after it, “St. Josaphat, who was the Buddha”, a lot too, in the way it plays with figurative language, twisting & turning the phrase “turned to Christ” in various ways. Nørth definitely has a talent for squeezing all of the possible meaning out of language until it means nothing—and to be clear, that is a compliment.
“St. Jude Thaddeus” is a tone shift from all that, written as a letter from Jude to his brother, Jesus Himself. Fitting for the patron saint of hopeless causes, Jude is writing to his brother hoping to see Him again, knowing it isn’t possible, and reminiscing on the past. It’s a very different piece compared to the rest here.
Part 5, Woe, is probably my favorite of the book. Which is fitting, because it’s also Nørth’s most recent work, written in 2024 published in the literary magazine Wanted a year after. Writes Nørth:
The concept was to make characters and write interviews with and reams had by those characters. I wasn’t sure if it would be a book or chapbook or what, and it sort of fizzled. Eventually, I was able to find a shape for it that felt satisfying, and I’m happy to present it in full as part of this book.
She also writes this concerning a specific piece of Woe, where a rabbi is asked about the genocide in Palestine:
One quick note in regard to the second interview with the Rabbi in this piece. I wrote it not terribly long after the October 7th attacks, and the characters’ words are in that context. I would hope that by the time I’m writing this in late 2025, even people like the Rabbi depicted would be more clearly condemning the Netanyahu government for its ever-escalating genocide of the Palestinian people. I cannot communicate the depth of my sorrow at seeing other Jews, people I am supposedly in some kind of theoretical community with, perpetrate such an atrocity, and my heart goes out to the Palestinian people.
The characters in the interview are as follows: Mother, Father (as in, a dad) Priest, Pastor, Rabbi, Actor, War Criminal, Soldier, Teacher, and the Interviewer. We see some of those characters’ dreams, though not all of their dreams, and not from all of the characters. The opener her is “[MOTHER, DREAM 04]”, where the maternal character describes frantically sucking cock in an effort to be friendly, and later crying as someone tries to play a strange, unknown game with her, trying to remember when everything was ok again. By the way, it’s not clear who the child is of the Mother & Father character; perhaps they are the Interviewer’s parents, or maybe they are somebody else’s.
I find the most interesting interviews to be the one of the Actor and the War Criminal. The Actor gives some interesting advice for people who want to get into acting, about people who put you on a pedestal, and when the Interviewer asks if they are acting right now, in this interview, they reply, “Who knows, who cares? I’m saying things and if they mean things and they’re interesting and fun, and we’re all having a good time, then who cares? You’re not my therapist.”
The War Criminal is interesting to me because they don’t talk like someone who’s committed a horrendous crime against humanity. They’re very logical, and the Interviewer and them get into a philosophical conversation where they argue that machines should run the government to avoid bias, but humans should still be able to vote in that system to keep democracy alive. It made me wonder if, within the setting of the story, “War Criminal” is a title the Interviewer gave them based on what they’ve done, and not specifically one the world has given them, if that makes sense. This is further enforced when they describe working with the Department Of Defense on tech for the conflict in Syria. Hmm. . .
I like the interviews with the Priest, Pastor, & Rabbi, because it shows the Interviewer character’s biases. They ask the Priest & Pastor interesting questions about the nature of faith, but only ask the Rabbi about Israel & Palestine. The Rabbi even calls the Interviewer out for this! It’s also revealed in this interview that everyone here is kept anonymous, and after checking this is the case, the Rabbi speaks his mind honestly.
Side note, I loved “[MOTHER, INTERVIEW 03, 16:03:03] for this line near the end: “Is this the extent of my wanderlust? The fucking smallness of my rebellion?” That line’s gonna live in my head rent-free, I swear to God.
The dreams are interesting, but I don’t have much more to say about them that I haven’t already said about the other pieces in the book. They take full advantage of the dream state & the poetic prose form. It’s interesting how they reveal more about the characters’ psyches, such as the War Criminal having sex with someone they find disgusting, or the Rabbi’s dream taking him back in time to “the year Kind Uzziah died”, and denying it when a monster calls him “Simon . . . his Evoker, his Conjurer”.
The section, and the book, concludes with an interview with the Soldier character, which is the only piece this character appears. The book started with death, and it concludes with it: in this interview, the Soldier starts with, “Everyone who dies should have someone crying for them. Crying needs to happen with loss. Crying is always about loss.” They talk about how they cry in private for those who they killed, tears leaving their eyes “like a mushroom letting out spores. Like a horse popping out piece after piece of shit while it’s walking, casual as can be.” This is how the book ends.
All in all, Black Hole Science Is Filled With Apologies is a beautiful, dreamy collection of 10+ years of work, one I definitely recommend you look into. Here’s a link to tRaum Books’ website with all of the links where you can buy this! I recommend purchasing it on itch.io.
That’s all for now. Thank you very much for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts on my review and/or the book.
It is officially out! Black Hole Science Is Filled with Apologies, a poetry-hybrid volume by Never Angeline North, is out in the wild and if you enjoy trans poetry and flash pieces that take you unexpected places, then please check it out! You can support Never by buying a physical or ecopy, or if you'd like to support the book, but have a zero book budget, you get a copy HERE for free, in exchange for an honest review. <333
Cover image: An illustration of two little girls looking out their bedroom window, at a giant snake. Cover designed by the author!
Black Hole Science stickers. Of the cover, an alternative cover, and of the author, with doodles drawn over!
I've been blogging about birding and birds and my life on my birding blog: whatmountains.mataroa.blog
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Heartwarming story: Little girl doesn’t have to do anything to fund her dad’s surgery because his expenses are covered by his country’s universal healthcare.
Human determination: Man bikes 18 miles to work every morning because he wants to and not because he can’t afford a car and would be fired if he’s late.
Spirit of Brotherhood: Neighbors host housewarming party for elderly resident who doesn’t need help in paying rent because his pension is more than enough.
SO INSPIRING: Local middle school students bake dozens of cupcakes because their home economics class is doing a baking unit. Their school is fully funded with everything they need.
It is officially out! Black Hole Science Is Filled with Apologies, a poetry-hybrid volume by Never Angeline North, is out in the wild and if you enjoy trans poetry and flash pieces that take you unexpected places, then please check it out! You can support Never by buying a physical or ecopy, or if you'd like to support the book, but have a zero book budget, you get a copy HERE for free, in exchange for an honest review. <333
Cover image: An illustration of two little girls looking out their bedroom window, at a giant snake. Cover designed by the author!
Black Hole Science stickers. Of the cover, an alternative cover, and of the author, with doodles drawn over!
Good morning with this queen 👑 This is a short little scene but I thought it was so funny how she was all in the center and seemed to unfazed by her surroundings. I slowed things down a bit in the middle. Stay warm and have a fabulous day with good vibes only!
Good morning with this queen 👑 This is a short little scene but I thought it was so funny how she was all in the center and seemed to unfazed by her surroundings. I slowed things down a bit in the middle. Stay warm and have a fabulous day with good vibes only!
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