Al Ortolani’s poems in Paper Birds Don’t Fly are a mix of small town memories and present day realities. They share both humor and sorrow, longing and contentment, often in the irony of a single experience. Many are set in Southeastern Kansas, a geographical region rich in the texture of its free-thinking people. The poems pinch the mundane arm. They bleed with the colors of everyday experience. Paper Birds Don’t Fly is as accessible to the reader as wind blowing autumn leaves or hedge trees intertwined with barbed wire, demarcating a bean field.