Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral

by Laura Read

This collection is divided into three sections. The first opens with the speaker’s reflections on her childhood loss of her father and subsequent move to a new house and a new life, a life in which she is always alert to the absences and danger but also a life in which she begins to see language as a kind of salvation. This section also develops the speaker’s first knowledge of sex, primarily in the poems, “The Goose Girl” and “A Woman Was Raped Here.” The second section follows the speaker into adolescence and young adulthood, and these poems further explore the sexual violence in the world in which the speaker lives, and how this violence affects her own feelings toward sex and romantic love. In the third section, the book finds love, work, and family, and the poems in this section about motherhood echo back to the first section as the speaker’s own parenting is influenced by how difficult it is to love when you know people die.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published November 28, 2012

Reviews

[Carey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sealey Challenge 2024: 21/31

This felt very manic pixie dream girl-esque which isn't really my jam. The poems essentially spin a web of the poet's life from her father's death through adolescence into adulthood and ending with motherhood. The poet also plays with different poetic styles and metaphorical language throughout the collection - some of which didn't seem well-executed. Overall, even though there were a lot of themes I could relate to in this, I found the poems long-winded and not especially insightful, but more convoluted.

[Emily Migliazzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mothers and aging both make me sad. Aging mothers make me inconsolable.

[Maddie Pearson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had the pleasure of having Laura as a professor at Spokane Falls Community College, which is mentioned in this book! Her personality shows through her writing, of which I had never explored prior to today. She has a way to make her own experiences feel as if they've been lived by everyone who reads them.

[Dolly Parton with a Gun · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are full of images that bend between real and surreal is a way that is still accessible and tangible. I really resonated with the Goose Girl poem in particular. Overall, this is a really strong collection!

[Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good God, this book is everything. So much longing and love and hope and heartbreak. Such a beautiful soundscape.

[Grace Applegate]

The Big Dipper!

[Nina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was drawn to this book by its title, but for those who aren’t fond of poetry chronicling death, don’t overlook this book based on the title. Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral is actually a cynical title, as the author’s mother is still living. Read’s father died during her childhood, an experience that certainly alters a young person’s perception of a safe and predictable world. It’s as though she is holding her breath, waiting for her mother to also die. Divided into three chronological sections, Read leads us through childhood and the rebuilding of life and family, into adolescence and sexual discovery, and finally to adulthood. I know some people skip around when reading poetry books, but I recommend you read this one in order, as the chronologic progression of the poems builds. Read does go back and forth in time within the sections, but the ordering is cohesive.

Read’s lines are full of images, lush layers of description which give you the sense that you’ve seen that town, stood on that corner, kissed that person. Her writing is filled with unique similes. Some images repeat, giving a sense of continuity, even though life has changed in a drastic way. In “Nocturnal,” the speaker describes sleepless nights as a child after her father died. She stares at “the shapes” and figures out that her family is moving.
And we’ll take the red curtains
and my brother

In “We Move to a House Where He Never Lived,” the speaker says
Mom hangs strips of yellow roses
on my walls, red curtains in the kitchen.

“Donut Parade,” in the second section, sounds like every teenage girl’s summer job. It starts
That was the summer I got up
in the middle of the night
to squirt raspberry filling and cream
into maple bars, a layer of grease
After describing a typical work day, Read ends the poem
At night, we went down
inside parks, into ditches where the boys
dragged kegs of beer. After the red plastic

cups, we crawled behind bushes with boys
who wanted to kiss us but in the morning
we were back in the kitchen,
our fingers thick with sugar.

In the third section, there are poems describing a lover, travel, teaching a night class, and having a baby
Read is skilled at taking personal narrative and making it universal, such as the experience of running into somebody you know from one part of your life in another circumstance. A woman in the night class turns out to be the nurse in the delivery room.
She’ll divide my body with a white sheet
so I won’t see them cut me.
Then she’ll stand on the other side,
hand the tools to the doctor, watch him
open me carefully
the way my mother slits an envelope
to neatly pull out a letter.
(Community College)
One of my favorite poems is the closing one, which seems to sum up everything. It starts with Read describing hunting down Neil Diamond and getting him to “sing me back to 1976.”
My parents will get down on their knees again
so they can dance with me and my brother.
Read goes on to talk about needing to contact Diamond in order to obtain copyright permission for a lyric quote she uses at the beginning of the book.
I have to call and email and fax
and then I have to send them a check
for $200 for two lines from “Brooklyn Roads,”
a song I thought I owned the rights to
already.
(Trying to Contact Neil Diamond)

[Amy Jamsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vivid imagery and harsh circumstances make for a sad but engaging story...

Read’s volume of poetry, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, is split into three parts. In the first part, readers learn of a father’s death and are given a glimpse into the life of his young daughter, her brother, and their mother, following the event. The second part details the girl’s life as a young adult while she travels the world, explores her sexuality, and has various relationships. The third part is where the title of the book comes into play-- the girl (now a young woman) worries about losing her mother and is still learning to cope with the hardship that befell her early in life. The title is a bit misleading, but her mother does not actually die. Our protagonist then gives birth to two sons and struggles with the knowledge that life is frail, and it’s much too easy to lose someone you love dearly.

Read does an excellent job of choosing interesting imagery and engaging syntax. She uses simple yet powerful phrases such as “cartoon flourishes of frost” and “so I can’t hear you not talking” that help the reader relate and become a part of the story themselves (“The Deaf Girls” and “Wyoming”). She also uses various styles of poetry throughout the book including poems all in couplets (“Watching Oksana”), prose (“Ars Poetica”), and poems divided into sections (“At the Chicago Art Institute…”). The different format and amount of white space on a page can mean different things. For example, prose often indicates a memory or dream.

The plot can be difficult to follow and sometimes requires outside research, but, for those who are willing to persevere through initially unclear sections, it provides an interesting storyline and progression of events. Read does an excellent job of displaying the powerful impact of the loss of a father on a young girl and of showing how this sort of event leaves an impression that lasts a lifetime. She explores powerful and difficult topics through creative comparisons. For example, in the poem “May 18, 1980” Read shows how an event as exciting as the eruption of Mt. St. Helens can become meaningless and dull in comparison with the tragedy at hand.

Overall, I found Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral to be an engaging compilation of poems and worth the read. The author successfully portrays the internal turmoil felt by the girl through the use of poetry, and much of the meaning would be lost had it been written in a more traditional, novel form. It is not, however, a book that should be picked up for light reading. The author writes about very challenging, complex themes and the poems are often harsh and distressing. Read is honest and blunt with her descriptions of the hardships that befall her protagonist; this lends to the story but does not allow for many light-hearted, joyful poems.
Instructions for My Mother's Funeral

[Kaitlyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laura Read is absolutely one of today’s most intelligent poets. Drawing me in with the title alone: Instructions for my Mother’s Funeral, her skillful writing and clever ideas kept me hooked until the very end. To anyone who picked this up and put it back down, I assure you you’re missing out on contemporary poetry that even those of us with no interest in the genre at all can appreciate and enjoy. Beginning with the poem The Pearl, the collection’s sort of forward or prologue, it can be difficult to see exactly where the story is going to progress to, but Read quickly dives into her tale on page 2, and the meaning of that prologue becomes increasingly clearer as the reading continues. The reader will quickly come to realize that it is not Laura Read’s mother who physically has left the world, but rather her father and at a far too young age. The raw emotion that fills every page stems from this, this recovery that Read and her completely incomplete family attempt to face with brave faces everyday from her father’s death on. And though not every poem in the collection is directly related to the death in every way, the emotion sticks to each word and runs across the pages, impossible to be missed by any.
One of the greatest things about the emotion portrayed by Laura Read however is sometimes its absence. There is never a sappy moment amongst the poems. What makes the emotion so powerful is the way it can come out from nowhere and hit you in the face, covering maybe one line of a poem. Take for example her poem Coney Island, 1977. The whole poem seems somewhat innocent. It takes place in its namesake and given date, and gives a look into one of Laura Read’s many memories. She touches on salt water taffy, enjoying time with her mother, and specifically riding an easy to picture boardwalk ride in which the cars are shaped like octopuses. It seems nostalgic, but nice, a fond memory for the both of them. The last two lines read as follows: “He drops his arms like seaweed/elegant and boneless.” This line just feels like this silent explosion. Though I’ve never personally talked with Laura Read so I can’t know it’s meaning for sure, to me it seems to be literally about the arms of the octopus ride, literally boneless and dropping because it is the next stop in their process. Symbolically, the picture that attached itself to that verse in my mind was the arms of a person laying lifeless. Terrifying but natural, sudden and tragic. And all of that in two lines! Her subtlety is one of her greatest writing choices, and she uses it flawlessly. Her poems are the antonym of cheesy, and that get her story across so much more effectively than if they were.
Overall, a fantastic collection of poems with such a story. Amzing job by Laura Read, and an absolute must read for the poetry lovers and even those that poetry disagrees with.

[Mustafa Mahmood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Are you longing for reading an intriguing book that is composed of pieces of poetry? If yes, then Instructions for My Mother’s funeral is your best option. The book is a masterpiece by Laura Read, a literature and creative writing teacher at Spokane Falls Community College. The book is a collection of stories of a girl’s life. The speaker of the book shares many glimpses of her life with the author. Throughout the speaker’s life, who starts the stories as a young girl and ends it as grown-up lady, the author is showing the type of challenges that might face a woman in her life.

The book highlights several themes. In the first part, the speaker is a child who lost her father and she is trying to familiarize herself with the world around her. In this part she also shows how much she is connected to her mother which is portrayed by the constant reference to her. For example, when her mother had an operation, she leaned over her and reminisced about the past. And when her mother got married she sympathized with her because her husband’s family did not accept her. Therefore, the theme portrayed in this part is childhood.

Another important theme in Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral was sexuality and adolescence. That is shown in the second part of the book when the speaker grew up and gets involved in some relationships. Most of these relations left scars in her heart because the men she was with were unworthy. One instance when she tackles this is in “In Paris Women Walk in the Dark.” She says;
“I want to tell
All the women you undress
That once you saw a girl by the garden
And you took her in your hands.
I want them to know
You will never love them.”

However, despite these scars, she has hope and courage. Toward the end of “Watching Oksana,” The speaker says; “but I know she is in there, skating.” As if she is saying I will go on despite the sadness.

The third part of the book is written under the theme of maternity. The speaker becomes a mother after she found her love. Throughout this section she reflects on her experience as a child. At the end of this section the speaker describes how her mother is aging and passing away. She does this in a very creative way. She makes the art work of artist Henri Matisse’s Five Heads of Jeannette analogous to her mother’s life. Every head of Matisse’s sculptures exemplify a story or a period of the speaker’s mom. The stories were told in a succinct and precise way just like the heads that show only the essentials.

I highly recommend this fictional book which is a life that every one of us can see his or her self in. And this is because it carries a lot of what we have or might face in life such as losing a dear person.

[Aleksey Fischer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loss, Love, and New Beginnings: A review of Laura Read’s Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral

Laura Read’s Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral takes the reader on a sad, insightful journey. In the beginning, her poems are from the point of view of a young girl whose father has recently passed away. Read allows the reader to feel the pain and anguish as the young girl and her brother struggle to deal with the indescribable pain that comes along with the loss of their father, the moving to a new home, and their mother’s remarriage. Read’s excellent use of imagery throughout her poems allows the reader to picture each setting that is being described as the speaker moves from places like Spokane, WA to New York and even Paris.
Although, in her poems, Read does not describe the character of her family members that much, the reader can get a sense of the relationship she has with each family member through the emotion in her poetry. She seems to have a great love for her deceased father – she always speaks of him lovingly and even describes a coat he bought for her that she kept and wore even when it became too small for her in the poem “Ars Poetica.” The speaker’s relationship with her mother is a little more complex. While they have a great love and connection – both of her mother’s parents also passed away – there is also a feeling of tension between them. The speaker and her brother went through the difficult task of dealing with the death of their father together at a very young age. As they grow up, however, they become more distant.
As the book progresses, we get glimpses of the speaker’s life at various stages of growing up. She starts as a young child unsure of how to deal with or address the loss of her father. Then we see her in adolescence – working at the Donut Parade and spending nights “down inside parks, into the ditches where the boys dragged kegs of beer.” As the poems progress further the reader gets to learn about the speaker’s adult life – her job at the community college, her husband, and her children.
Through her use of imagery and emotion, Read brings the reader on a journey and allows he or she to feel like they are taking a glimpse into the losses, love, and life of the speaker. Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral evoked a great feeling of empathy in me when I was reading. I felt as though I could really picture each setting and event being described because of Read’s great use of emotion and imagery in each one of her poems. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a story to connect with. Even if you are not a fan of poetry, as I am not, you will be sure to enjoy this collection and the beauty in Read’s writing.

[Noelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laura Read’s 2011 Donald Hall Prize winning book Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral is not just a collection of excellent poems, but also a narrative of a woman’s life and her experiences through childhood, adolescence, and the beginnings of motherhood. While many of the poems are influenced by Read’s own experiences, we cannot assume the speaker of every poem is Read herself. The poems express the grief and confusion of a young girl losing her father and the influence of the women in the speaker’s family as she grows as a woman herself. We experience glimpses of breaking relationships and sexual experiences that bring sorrow, pain, and frustration. However, we also experience the beginning of a new job, new relationships, pregnancies, and a budding family.

Each of the three sections of the book share poems focused on a different stage in the woman’s life. The first section contains poems recollecting her childhood. The door of this section flies open with the poem “The Door Flies Open” and the final moments of her father’s life. After his death, the family packs up everything they know and “the boxes of sleep in the closet because [they’ll] want to remember what if felt like to live here” (Nocturnal). The speaker and her brother feel a loss of identity and cling to objects that remind them of their past home, past father, and past life. The speaker is also introduced to sexuality and sexual violence during this time. This section closes with the poem “Ars Poetica” another poem that clings tightly to her past identity by continuing to wear “a green coat with white embroidered flowers and white fur trim from the Sears catalogue” that her father bought for her even though it is far too small and worn out. Read makes the loss of the speaker’s father and innocence during childhood a relatable experience. The second section is filled with travel and discovery, of new places, relationships, and what it is to be a woman. The beautiful Northwest is the hometown of this traveling speaker, but no matter where she goes, “Sydney Beijing, somewhere on the other side of the blue globe [she] used to spin with [her] eyes closed, land [her] finger”, the author is sure to take you with her (Seatac). The final section seems to be a new beginning. The speaker gets new jobs, a new relationship, and starts a new family. Even though there is a start of new love and life, Read expresses how scared the speaker is of losing that just like she lost her father so long ago.

I really enjoyed Read’s work and was able to experience many things and many emotions I never have before through her poetry.

[Samantha Seward · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the way that this collection of poems told a story. Although confusing at times, the book follows the life of a girl whose father has died, whose mother gets remarried and eventually, as the story progresses, her mother dies as well. The story starts when the speaker is a young child and slowly progresses in three parts to adulthood. I loved how raw and harsh things could be at times such as in the poem In Paris Women Walk in the Dark, the speaker says “I want them to know/ you will never love them” (Read 48). This unscripted statement seems so harsh and cold but also so truthful and honest. It allows the reader to feel alone and vulnerable just as the speaker. I also loved the hidden messages or potential meaning things could have such as in the poem Hide and Seek the lines “When she got out of the water,/ our coach wrapped her in his towel” (Read 34). This suggests that the coach might have had an inappropriate relationship with the girl given the context of the poem describing the girl as Barbie-like with “Barbie breasts”.
At times the poems could be confusing because of the concept of time. Some poems would be present day taking place in Spokane and the next poem could be taking place in New York. The reader would have to figure out if the poem was actually happening somewhere else, or was it present day but the speaker was telling the story of a memory or was it a flashback meant to take the reader to the past. The reader would have to pay attention to the context to decipher what was happening which to me distracted the reader and therefore the poems message was taken away from the reader.
I liked how the book was broken up into three parts because it signaled that the perspective of time was changing and the parts allowed the reader to see that. The first part was written from the perspective of a child who had just lost her father and the struggles as the family try to move on. The second part was from the same perspective but from a teenager/young adult age. And the final part was from the perspective of an adult with children.
The main reason I was frustrated in reading this collection was I felt that the first part had a very central idea of grieving the death of the speaker’s father but the other two parts didn’t have a central theme. I was also disappointed that there wasn’t much of the death of the speaker’s mother when the book is called Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral. However, overall I loved the collection, will enjoy reading it again over the years as I go through different but similar stages of my life, and would recommend it to anyone, despite their feelings towards poetry.

[Eric Mcgaughey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book Review: Instructions for My Mother's Funeral
“Instructions for My Mother's Funeral,” by Laura Read, was quite an enjoyable, thought-provoking, book of poems. Though this is not a novel, the poems are connected, and while they do not exhibit a traditional story arc, the story about a young girl and her brother coping with their father's death, and about the girl's progression through her own life, is told eloquently through each poem. Not only that, but the book deals not with traditional feelings of sadness that one might expect from an adult who lost a loved one, but rather with coping and escape mechanisms that one might be saddened to see a young child employ. For example, in the poem “This Time We'll Go to Kentucky Fried Chicken,” the brother tells his sister, after their father has died, that if their mother dies as well, they'll eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken instead of at Wendy's. Other poems, however, are much more implicit than “This Time We'll Go to Kentucky Fried Chicken,” and could only be speculated about. One such poem is “The Big Dipper.” Personally, I have trouble nailing down exactly what this poem is about, but it is beautiful nonetheless. Many of the poems in this book are like “The Big Dipper,” in that sense, but that served only to enhance my enjoyment of the collection. I have long felt that to assert that every poem or piece of literature has a definite meaning that can be pin-pointed is to short-change many great works, and while I can pin-point many of the works in this particular collection, there remain many that I cannot. I may not understand some of the metaphors in “The Big Dipper,” in the way that I understand the more literal elements of “This Time We'll Go,” or in the way that I understand the title “Ars Poetica,” to mean meta-poetry, but “The Big Dipper,” Is a beautiful poem, even if I don't pick up on many of its subtleties. Clearly, Laura Read is a skilled author in that she can make a person enjoy her writing without spoon-feeding them with respect to its meaning. For this reason, my personal rating for “Instructions for My Mother's Funeral,” is 4 stars out of 5. I believe that its literary merit might actually be of the 5 star nature, but I prefer novels to books of poetry, and I never said I was a disinterested judge. That, and I have a particular distaste for much of the Inland Northwest (it's all hillbillies and wheat fields, it sometimes seems). That having been said, I enjoyed reading this book of poems thoroughly, and commend the author on her use of subtle literary devices, her choice of subject matter, and her expert command of the English language.

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laura Read is a delightful poet whose work I have admired for a long time. I was thrilled to find that her new volume of poetry is finally available.

Read excels in setting. The locations in her poems take on the depth and dimensions of fully fleshed characters. She captures more than just the essence of a place. Having been to some of the locales featured in her poems, I find her descriptive prowess downright eerie in its perfection.

Read's speakers are imbued with a paradoxical flair of naïve wisdom that leaps from the page and pierces the innermost chambers of the reader's heart. The speakers range from little girls to women, all of whom eagerly whisper their secrets and desires in the reader's ear as if you were their long lost childhood bosom buddy. This collection will easily pull you back for a second and third read. With each re-reading, I discovered another layer of nuanced detail. Always enchanting, Read has produced a body of poetry that delights and intimately engages the reader, leaving you warmly satisfied, yet longing for more.

Highly Recommended!

[William Reichard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, this is a solid collection of poems that explore the life of the narrator from girlhood to womanhood. Read writes about the death of her father, her mother's life as a widow and her remarriage, and finally, the narrator's own experiences as a mother. The work is consistent and strong. It's a first book, and this becomes clear as the reader begins to notice similar themes, and even repetitious language, popping up throughout the book. Still, a good book and worth reading.

[Sarah A. K. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think it was an interesting type of poetry. It was a life story in the context of poetry, which is much nicer. I like poetry and this book contain really nice poems, easy to understand and one can relate to it.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

A favorite: "Coney Island, 1977"
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