Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley
New and coming soon: notable books with a focus on motherhood and women’s lives.
Joan Kwon Glass, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, Perugia Press, September 2024, poetry.
Cast across continents and centuries, matrilineage and inherited silences, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms explores colonialism and “postcolonialism” through disordered eating, suicide loss, religious damage, familial estrangement, addiction, motherhood, and recovery. These poems ask urgent questions: What does it mean to be a mixed-race survivor of generational traumas in a world that often insists on binaries and singular narratives? What role does “hunger” play in navigating life in the diaspora? And, ultimately, what is required to raise an American daughter while forging a path forward?
M.A. Nicholson, Around the Gate, The Word Works, June 2024, poetry.
Around the Gate is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems that “engage the ghosts and lives of New Orleans through the experiences and memories of the female speaker” (The Word Works). The collection is written for adults but is appropriate for readers as young as 13 years old. Beyond local color and Creole culture, the collection treats archetypal figures in mythology and the literary tradition as contemporary personae, frequently in a dramatic monologue. The poems span across several times and time zones, and readers are just as likely to find themselves cruising down St. Claude Street in New Orleans in the 1980s as they are to find themselves on an ancient beach of Naxos, in the Aegean Sea. The manuscript may easily be interpreted through a feminist or ecopoetic lens, moving between familial, or domestic scenes and tales of travel and transformation.
Wendy Wisner, The New Life, Cornerstone Press, September 2024, poetry.
The New Life is a braided collection of poems that explores motherhood through the lens of a fractured childhood and intergenerational loss and trauma. Moving through the intense years of early motherhood, the speaker’s childhood memories and fears muscle their way into her consciousness. Stories of loss return throughout the book: a grandmother’s stillbirth, a child lost on the boat from Russia to the U.S., friends’ miscarriages and child losses. There are poems written in the wake of 9/11 and Sandy Hook. Throughout the manuscript, we see the speaker wrestling with the turmoil of raising children in a volatile, violent world.
Ellen Kombiyil, Love as Invasive Species, Cornerstone Press, September 2024, poetry.
Love as Invasive Species traces the poet’s matrilineal line to interrogate learned inheritances. The poet deftly resurrects (her) dead to interrogate memory, accuracy, the way images overlap and combine to tell parts of the story, and touches upon trauma and the difficulty of reassembling “truth”. Ultimately, the book transcends its cast of characters to explore larger cultural themes of gendered power dynamics, expectations, reproductive rights, femininity, and female desire to ask—What grows from complex soil of inheritance? How do we (all) learn to love?
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas, A Shared and Sacred Space, Kelsay Books, June 2024, poetry.
Written in both free and formal verse and divided into two sections, Shared and Sacred, this book of poems explores the fragility of love and life, capturing the most intimate of experiences to the most universal.
DeMisty D. Bellinger, All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere, University of Nebraska Press, September 2024, literary fiction (short stories).
Fantastical, sensual, and as beguilingly strange as they are insightful and real, the stories of All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere are centered around intimate familial or romantic relationships, featuring protagonists who make awesome discoveries—from the beautiful to the horrible—in seemingly mundane situations. The protagonists in each story come from marginalized communities, which sometimes exacerbates their problems but always allows for unique perspectives and epiphanies. The writing is rich and playful, whether the characters are coy or startlingly direct, creating worlds in which the metaphorical might become literal in the blink of an eye. DeMisty D. Bellinger finds magic in the smallest moments and makes the biggest moments resonate with a quiet intensity.
Daneen Bergland, The Goodbye Kit, Airlie Press, September 2024, poetry.
Narrative but elliptical, The Goodbye Kit is awash in lyric that thrills as it laments. Themes of transgression and longing infuse these poems about girlhood, marriage, parenthood, aging, and nature. Mapping the charged terrain of human relationship, and marked by a feral sensuality, they explore ecologies of intimacy made tangible through both experience and witness. Their impulse is to capture and project beauty and loss, but also view our mutable and tender flesh through “wolf-colored glasses,” revealing us as the beautiful, culpable animals we are.
Desiree Richter, The Presence of Absence: Kitchen table talks about parenting, leaving fundamentalism, and the very messy business of living with loss, University of New Orleans Press, October 2024, creative nonfiction (essays).
“When I laid down the dogma, I picked up wonder for the world.” And that wonder, Desiree Richter has found, is as much about embracing pleasure as it is about granting grief the stewardship that it requires. In 2000, Richter’s two-year-old son Elijah died in a tragic domestic accident. The world as she knew it was dismantled along with her understanding of her place in it, leaving her to figure out how to parent her remaining children, how the fundamentalist Christian faith she’d practiced all her life fit into her new reality—and, most fundamentally, how to heal.
Nicole Callihan, Pichchenda Bao, & Jennifer Franklin, Editors, Braving the Body, Harbor Editions, March 2024, poetry (anthology).
It is only through the body that we receive images, and mostly through the images that we receive poems. Braving the Body is a collection of these fierce images; of 116 bodies; of, as Whitman writes in Leaves of Grass, “head, neck, hair, ears . . . mouth, tongue, lips . . . bowels sweet and clean . . . brain in its folds inside the skull frame . . . heart valves”; of Liza Katz Duncan’s 10-week pregnant body driving south; of Diane Seuss’s hair “the color of a field mouse” and Justin Wymer’s “pill the color of her hair”; of the cast made of Drew Skelton’s teeth; the discarded membranes of Fia Montero’s “Diastasis Recti Abdominis”; the imagined daffodils planted by “our children’s children” of Ann Fisher-Wirth’s final consummation with her beloved. Absurd, sublime, anxious, and tender—these poems resonate in the very place they were born—the brave body in all its gore and glory.
Pepper Stetler, A Measure of Intelligence: One Mother’s Reckoning with the IQ Test, Diversion Books, August 2024, creative nonfiction (essays).
In a quest to advocate for her daughter, Pepper Stetler uncovers the dark history of IQ tests that leads her to question what exactly we are measuring when we measure intelligence. Blending a mother’s love and dedication to her daughter with incisive historical and cultural analysis. A Measure of Intelligence investigates the origins and influence of the IQ test on our modern education system, questions how we define and judge intelligence, challenges its flawed foundation and argues for a fundamental reevaluation of how we understand an individual’s perceived potential.
Amy Stuber, Sad Grownups, Stillhouse Press, October 2024, literary fiction (short stories).
In her powerful debut, Amy Stuber explores the search for joy in a dying world, where being an adult means performing narrow versions of acceptability on repeat. In each story, a roadmap for release from the strictures of American consumerism, gender roles, and the strain of living through climate crisis. To read this collection is to follow each character as they search fervently for liberation, understanding, and even happiness, wherever and however they might be found.
Leslie Williams, Matters for You Alone, Slant Books, May 2024, poetry.
Motherhood is an intimate underpinning to all of the poems in Matters for You Alone. The collection makes a spiritual exploration of friendship: its shapes and duties, stresses and blames—and its absolute necessity. The book takes its title from Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s classic, Abandonment to Divine Providence, as it strives to interpret everyday encounters and events—the domestic, the parental, the mundane—in light of the eternal.
Claire Millikin, Magicicada, Unicorn Press, May 2024, poetry.
“In Claire Millikin’s Magicicada, the painful realities of transgenerational trauma are transformed into a poetry that questions, mourns, and ultimately heals. And beneath it all is the wisdom of nature, particularly that of the smallest creatures singing in the periphery of our lives.”—José Antonio Rodríguez, author of The Day’s Hard Edge