Diane di Prima published the poetry collection This Kind of Bird Flies Backward in 1958.
The book was an early major publication by di Prima, who became associated with the Beat movement while living and writing in New York and later San Francisco. Her work often combined personal experience, political awareness, sexuality, spirituality, and an interest in alternative literary communities.
Di Prima was born in Brooklyn in 1934 and began writing poetry as a teenager. Alongside her poetry, she wrote plays, prose, memoir, and correspondence, and she helped edit the literary newsletter The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones. The newsletter circulated experimental writing among prominent writers of the period.
This Kind of Bird Flies Backward is sometimes overlooked beside better-known Beat-era books by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. Di Prima, however, became one of the movement’s important women writers and later published the memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman.