The only way people get out of Worcester is in a body bag, people used to say when Mal was growing up in the Main South neighborhood-crash-landing in house after house like true wrens, her family's nutty avian namesake.

Raising Wrenns recounts her trips back to Worcester after the men in her family lost their lives; first her dad when he was shot, and later her brother who committed suicide jumping off a roof. On these trips she revisits the shoddy apartments they perched in, resurrecting her macabre, sometimes comical childhood memories of the streets where they fought bloody and birdlike for their survival.