White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood

by Rishma Dunlop, Adrienne Rich, Cathy Stonehouse

Edited by poet Rishma Dunlop, White Ink is a unique collection of poems on mothers and motherhood, by some of the finest poets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Unsentimental, unflinching, and edgy, White Ink registers the social and political changes, as well as the imaginative pulse, of recent history through the figure of the mother: a powerful, recurring, and central symbol in contemporary poetry. Spanning multiple cultures, ethnicities, genders, and languages, White Ink is a landmark anthology. Poets include Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Alicia Ostriker, Joy Harjo, Sharon Olds, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gwendolyn McEwan, Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier, Allen Ginsberg, Irving Layton, Priscila Uppal, Bronwen Wallace, Maxine Kumin, Sandra Gilbert, Grace Paley, Brenda Hillman, John Barton, Samuel Menashe, Richard Teleky, Margo Berdeshevsky, Marilyn Hacker, Steven Heighton, John Terpstra, John Barton, C.D. Wright, Cherrie Moraga, Natasha Trethewey, Rita Dove, Adrienne Rich, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Nicole Brossard, Annie Finch, Marie Ponsot, Mahmoud Darwish, Fady Joudah, Naomi Shihab Nye, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, Deema Shehabi, Claudia Rankine, Ingrid de Kok, Gabeba Baderoon, Carolyn Forché, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Mary Karr, Philip Levine, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Rosemary Sullivan, Jean Valentine, Meena Alexander, Goran Simic, and many others.

Genres: Poetry

419 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

a collection of poems on motherhood - I enjoyed the breadth of the selections touching on many subtopics and emotions related to this topic. Although there were not many that I was absolutely in love with as poems it made me was to write.

[Susan Eubank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed. Should probably buy it to enjoy it more instead of reordering it through interlibrary loan for the third time.

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This anthology had several well-known poets (Sexton, Plath, Olds, Dove) as well as many lesser-heard voices. As someone who writes occasionally about my son (and whose chapbook is about infertility/adoption), I felt that the book's strongest emphasis was on the physical aspects of motherhood - pregnancy, breast-feeding, etc. Although that is obviously a huge part of motherhood for most women, I must admit to feeling a little - I don't know - ignored?

My favorite poems were more about the act of mothering, the connection a mother has with a child. One of my favorite Olds poems, "The Latest Injury," is an example of a this.

There were also,I felt, too many elegy poems for the dead mother. With the exceptional material being published by poets/parents on sites like Literary Mama and The Fertile Source, I would have liked to have seen more from this anthology.