An Armsfull of Birds: A Personal Field Guide to Love, Loss, and Commitment

A story of recovery, love, and loss--a memoir of healing ourselves and the natural world.

Cara Benson did not come to love easy. As a low bottom addict, she crawled through subway tunnels and partnered with an abusive man. When she came face to face with her own death, she chose life. Her journey of survival led her into recovery, to climbing mountains, and ultimately to Jon, the man with whom she cultivated a relationship that began as "second chance lovers" and slowly developed into one as lifetime partners.

Years later, Benson unexpectedly found herself in devastation as she came to terms with losing Jon to suicide. As she retreated into her grief, she also retreated into the woods of upstate New York, exploring the forests not as the avid hiker she'd become in recovery, but as a meanderer who had lost her way. Here she found more grief in her observation of the effects of climate change.

In confronting her loss, Benson came to realize that the lessons she learned from loving Jon in sickness, health, and death could be applied to her relationship with the non-human world. From squirreling away oak acorns for reforestation of a logged property to maintaining feeders for the birds Jon adored, Benson's daily life became a sort of field guide for how to live with a deep and abiding commitment to the future of the planet despite challenging odds.

Moving through the intensely personal and kindred terrain of love, recovery, and loss, An Armsfull of Birds is a climate memoir that tells the story of developing deeply held commitments to ourselves, to those we love, and ultimately to the ailing natural world.

Author: Cara Benson
Publisher: Health Communications
Published: 05/19/2026
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.30w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780757325557

About the Author
Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, Orion Magazine, Sierra Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Terrain, and selected for Best American Poetry. Her first book, a collection of prose poems called (made), was well reviewed in The Huffington Post and The Brooklyn Rail, among other publications. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and the bpNichol Award. Benson wrote a series on walking in the woods for the Best American Poetry website and taught poetry in a NY State Correctional Facility for eight years. She lives in a former church on the ancestral homelands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians in upstate NY.