In 'Local Bird, ' Laurence Musgrove offers us both new poems and previously published selections from descant, New Texas, Concho River Review, Elephant Journal, Sleet Magazine, Inside Higher Ed, and Southern Indiana Review. Organized into eight sections, this collection speaks in a consistently simple, direct, generous, and tender style about teaching and learning, reading and writing, domestic conflict, the family pet, as well as meditations on the natural world. But it's not all serious business; Musgrove shows a playful side while poking fun at modern technology, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and even his job as a college teacher of writing. And then there are those more formal and melodic examples in poems like "If You Want Me" and "Barbequing in the Rain" that explore more regular rhythms and rhymes.