Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing
Catherine Wagner, ed., Rebecca Wolff, ed.
“The poets in this anthology have been ravished, whacked, illuminated, blown away by the experience of motherhood. The thousand experiences. The thousand interruptions. The fact that it is never what we expected, and that it is overwhelmingly intense. The intensity of the poems here bespeaks both the power of maternity in bending us to its will, and the power of the artist to resist-while-submitting. Nobody here plays a standard mom role, although there are numerous gestures in the direction of things moms do, like nurse babies and persist through exhaustion. . . . The poetry makes the difference. This is a book of experimental poetry, poetry that experiments with how it sits on the page, and with diction, syntax, location and dislocation, and with emotion and intelligence, with elements of language at peace and at war. Grace under pressure, maybe, and maybe not. Comedy, brutality, farce, mystery, ecstasy, reality. Details. Abstractions.”
—from the foreword by Alicia Ostriker
