In the words of “Tess Gallagher, Crawford subscribes to the reader's own ability to undergo metamorphosis-through poetry to become, for fleeting moments, like birds who are, through his re-imagining, capable of entering our very souls to build, “secret nests.” In the words of one of his poems: “birds can enter you from any direction/and a fly-through, even by the common sparrow/can take out the heart."