Folio Editors Cindy Veach and Anna V.Q. Ross
To mother is to live with the constant oscillation between noise (kids, advice, to dos, societal
expectations) and silence (naptime, playdates, custody arrangements, estrangement, empty nest).
The poems in this folio explore this dichotomy through a soundscape of bees, a whistling kettle,
chorus of robins, white static, a children’s chorus, yawping coyotes, the startling jangle of a lock,
and the squeal of a rabbit. Meanwhile, silence becomes both refuge and erasure: a closed door, a
silent stone, the ghost of a lost constellation, the taste of ginger, a wall of gray clouds, and the
emptiness of frozen Iowa fields. In these poems, we encounter the mother who is shaped by the
demands she must answer to, the things she cannot say, and the sounds she hears now but may
only later understand. These are mothers negotiating the difficult balance between responding to
every call and finding quiet within the chaos, then finding themselves within the quiet.
Anna V. Q. Ross and Cindy Veach
Rachel Beachy – All the Small Things
Jessica Bozek – Lost Constellation: Noctua
Alexis David – A Topography of Motherhood
Andrea Deeken – Silent Treatment
Carol Dorf – Ignore Them: Memorial Day
Caitlin Gildrien – The Stone Sits Down to Dinner
L. Bellee Jones-Pierce – Early May
U-Meleni Mhlaba-Adebo – Her Voice in the Wind
Jane C. Miller – I will burn with it
Sara Wallace – The Perfect Stage
Cindy Veach is the author of three poetry collections: Monster Galaxy (MoonPath Press), Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) an Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press) a Paterson Poetry Prize finalist and Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read.’ Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poet Lore and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Philip Booth Prize and Samuel Allen Washington Prize. Cindy is Poetry Editor of MER.
Anna V. Q. Ross’s most recent book, Flutter, Kick (Red Hen Press, 2022), won the 2020 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and the 2023 Julia Ward Howe Award in Poetry and was named a Best New Poetry Book by the New York Public Library. Her previous collections include If a Storm (Anhinga Press, winner of the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry); Figuring (Bull City Press); and Hawk Weather (winner the New Women’s Voices Prize from Finishing Line Press and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Society).