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The Mothers
66 pages, Hardcover
Published November 14, 2025
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February 1, 2026
Erika Eckart’s The Mothers (2025) is a collection of often longish poems about, not surprisingly, the process, the roles, the various ways, all the spiritual and psychic and visceral dimensions of mothering. I should say I count Erika as a friend, though not well known to me, but we have had some good connections in the past couple years. She’s an English teacher at the high school where my kids went to school, and where I have done work over the years. We both have kids with pretty severe autism. But I had read none of her work, til recently. I went to the book opening at our local library the other day, (mid January 2026) the day after I finished my first reading of the book.
I don’t believe in objectivity when I read or review, but I do believe honesty and balance are important. And I think I can be very enthusiastic here without betraying journalistic integrity! As a parent, as a writer, I am often moved by these poems, and in almost every poem I am surprised by something, an image, a sudden directional shift. I was somewhat playfully thinking as I read that, because I could connect with the poems on a personal level, it could have been called The Fathers in my thinking--that it could be my personal title for it--and she would of course acknowledge that fathers have a crucial role in parenting, but that's just a way of saying I could relate to it deeply as a parent. Seriously, it's a book about parenting that only mothers can truly know, I think. It’s not very much about men at all.
At the library reading, babies crawled and children ran around. It felt, given the focus of the title, less like a church service--your mother’s poetry reading?--than it was a gathering of families and friends, messy in a good way, relaxed, but intensely passionate, too. I sometimes gasped at the surprises as I heard these poems read, but also as I had read them by myself. I not rarely came to tears in moments of recognition, and solidarity.
Erika reads as she talks, as I also do, often fast, making quick darting connections, insights, between ideas and images. Sometimes I and others connect the way I talk and think to adhd, and I thought, as I heard her read, and as I had read the poems, I think and often talk and write quite a bit like this, on the surface messy, interrupting my own thoughts to jump to another thing, then another thing, and hopefully bringing things back to some kind of central idea or image. She does this, which may in part speak to why I like it, and this way of thinking surely works for her. She makes sense of mothering for us, picking it up, turning around, looking at it from various angles.
The poems are very personal, always, I guess I might say confessional, autopoetic, reminding me of other women poets/writers of the body--Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds. She writes about her own kids and her own mother and grandmother and the emotional connections she has with them. The book is about mothering, but this is something sisters can do, and grandmothers, aunts. And the book is about other mothers, too, a range of them. Sometimes I thought of the pieces as mini-essays, exploring different dimensions of "the topic," several ways of looking at a blackbird sort of thing, but they are also fundamentally narrative, and poems, as prose poems are meant to be.
One thing that occurred to me as a person of a certain age who had lived and read through different “waves” of feminism, that mothers were often denigrated as “breeders,” sometimes seen as dismissed as buying into patriarchy or something by having kids. Well, we read of struggle here, scarcity, disability, pain, anguish, but never regret, always ultimately affirming the deepest connections of mothering for her, and, I think, for many. Lots of love here to go around.
Here’s a couple of whole poems:
The Bends by Erika Eckart
My girl chopped off all her hair. Before she did this, I was tethered to the nightly ritual of detangling and braiding the thickets, which appeared each night at the base of her neck, sailor’s knots, made out of the wind and sweat and motion of her day. It was my job to find an entry point in each and as gently as possible restore order. Now, there will be no more dimly-lit nights wedged between my thighs of stay still and beauty is pain, no more of the tug, the chunks gripped, the tension of my pull and hers, her still warm from the bath and the room too hot really for sitting next to anyone. No more How could you do this to me? when my comb caught a difficult tangle. No more complaining about what I could do with this time, and would she just stop wiggling, it would be so much easier if you could just be still. So you would think I would be relieved it is over, but I just sit next to her anyway, stroke what is left of her hair until she is irritated, amble about picking up small things, bereft, unmoored. This is another way she doesn’t need me anymore. These burdens, sloughing off a little at a time, are slowly shifting from me to her, the transition stair-stepped like methadone which is a kindness because if one day I awoke and this creature who so dearly depended on me and ate only from my body and clutched my fingers to fall asleep, whose cries were the tides that controlled my day all at once didn’t need me anymore, I might float away from the sudden shock, an anchor cut from below. There’s danger in letting go too quickly. Like how scuba divers cannot emerge from the pressure of great depths too fast, otherwise they will get the bends, pockets of air that bloom in their chests and explode. Instead, to surface safely they gradually reach little milestones, pulling back the compressing fingers of the water one at a time.
Tethered by Erika Eckart
On the news, the aerial panning shot of the beach coated with whale bodies reads like an ancient inscription, the scattered hatch marks of their remains letters in a forgotten language, tea leaves telling us something. The reporter describes the smell: overwhelming, a million rancid fish markets, thousands of pounds of bodies about to explode with rot if someone doesn’t do something soon. No one knows why seemingly healthy whales beach themselves. It might be navy sonar or some quirk in the shape of the ocean floor that makes them do it, sure, but there is a theory that they are so tightly bonded when faced with loss they commit mass suicide. This is predicated on other shows of attachment: sometimes adult males follow their mothers in death for no reason but heartbreak, and when a captive whale had her baby taken away, she rammed herself against the side of the tank, cried out with vocalizations no human had ever heard, long distance wails at lower frequencies, the kind that travel farther in the deep ocean—having never lived in the wild, never having heard these sounds, somehow she found them, in the rubbery gray folds of her brain, the clicks and screeches that would locate the lost little one if only there were sea between them instead of sky. So maybe, scientists think, when one is sick and in resignation dawdles in the short water where you can feel and see the sun, they all follow. Maybe they’re confused, maybe begging the ill member to return with them to the deep sea, but maybe they know their mother/daughter/cousin is done for and they’ve decided they can’t go on, that life after is too dim. That to wade into the shallows and let the tide take them away is better than a lifetime of calling out to their missing member and receiving only silence in return. Maybe that’s the message the beached bodies leave us: a tether works two ways.
I don’t believe in objectivity when I read or review, but I do believe honesty and balance are important. And I think I can be very enthusiastic here without betraying journalistic integrity! As a parent, as a writer, I am often moved by these poems, and in almost every poem I am surprised by something, an image, a sudden directional shift. I was somewhat playfully thinking as I read that, because I could connect with the poems on a personal level, it could have been called The Fathers in my thinking--that it could be my personal title for it--and she would of course acknowledge that fathers have a crucial role in parenting, but that's just a way of saying I could relate to it deeply as a parent. Seriously, it's a book about parenting that only mothers can truly know, I think. It’s not very much about men at all.
At the library reading, babies crawled and children ran around. It felt, given the focus of the title, less like a church service--your mother’s poetry reading?--than it was a gathering of families and friends, messy in a good way, relaxed, but intensely passionate, too. I sometimes gasped at the surprises as I heard these poems read, but also as I had read them by myself. I not rarely came to tears in moments of recognition, and solidarity.
Erika reads as she talks, as I also do, often fast, making quick darting connections, insights, between ideas and images. Sometimes I and others connect the way I talk and think to adhd, and I thought, as I heard her read, and as I had read the poems, I think and often talk and write quite a bit like this, on the surface messy, interrupting my own thoughts to jump to another thing, then another thing, and hopefully bringing things back to some kind of central idea or image. She does this, which may in part speak to why I like it, and this way of thinking surely works for her. She makes sense of mothering for us, picking it up, turning around, looking at it from various angles.
The poems are very personal, always, I guess I might say confessional, autopoetic, reminding me of other women poets/writers of the body--Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds. She writes about her own kids and her own mother and grandmother and the emotional connections she has with them. The book is about mothering, but this is something sisters can do, and grandmothers, aunts. And the book is about other mothers, too, a range of them. Sometimes I thought of the pieces as mini-essays, exploring different dimensions of "the topic," several ways of looking at a blackbird sort of thing, but they are also fundamentally narrative, and poems, as prose poems are meant to be.
One thing that occurred to me as a person of a certain age who had lived and read through different “waves” of feminism, that mothers were often denigrated as “breeders,” sometimes seen as dismissed as buying into patriarchy or something by having kids. Well, we read of struggle here, scarcity, disability, pain, anguish, but never regret, always ultimately affirming the deepest connections of mothering for her, and, I think, for many. Lots of love here to go around.
Here’s a couple of whole poems:
The Bends by Erika Eckart
My girl chopped off all her hair. Before she did this, I was tethered to the nightly ritual of detangling and braiding the thickets, which appeared each night at the base of her neck, sailor’s knots, made out of the wind and sweat and motion of her day. It was my job to find an entry point in each and as gently as possible restore order. Now, there will be no more dimly-lit nights wedged between my thighs of stay still and beauty is pain, no more of the tug, the chunks gripped, the tension of my pull and hers, her still warm from the bath and the room too hot really for sitting next to anyone. No more How could you do this to me? when my comb caught a difficult tangle. No more complaining about what I could do with this time, and would she just stop wiggling, it would be so much easier if you could just be still. So you would think I would be relieved it is over, but I just sit next to her anyway, stroke what is left of her hair until she is irritated, amble about picking up small things, bereft, unmoored. This is another way she doesn’t need me anymore. These burdens, sloughing off a little at a time, are slowly shifting from me to her, the transition stair-stepped like methadone which is a kindness because if one day I awoke and this creature who so dearly depended on me and ate only from my body and clutched my fingers to fall asleep, whose cries were the tides that controlled my day all at once didn’t need me anymore, I might float away from the sudden shock, an anchor cut from below. There’s danger in letting go too quickly. Like how scuba divers cannot emerge from the pressure of great depths too fast, otherwise they will get the bends, pockets of air that bloom in their chests and explode. Instead, to surface safely they gradually reach little milestones, pulling back the compressing fingers of the water one at a time.
Tethered by Erika Eckart
On the news, the aerial panning shot of the beach coated with whale bodies reads like an ancient inscription, the scattered hatch marks of their remains letters in a forgotten language, tea leaves telling us something. The reporter describes the smell: overwhelming, a million rancid fish markets, thousands of pounds of bodies about to explode with rot if someone doesn’t do something soon. No one knows why seemingly healthy whales beach themselves. It might be navy sonar or some quirk in the shape of the ocean floor that makes them do it, sure, but there is a theory that they are so tightly bonded when faced with loss they commit mass suicide. This is predicated on other shows of attachment: sometimes adult males follow their mothers in death for no reason but heartbreak, and when a captive whale had her baby taken away, she rammed herself against the side of the tank, cried out with vocalizations no human had ever heard, long distance wails at lower frequencies, the kind that travel farther in the deep ocean—having never lived in the wild, never having heard these sounds, somehow she found them, in the rubbery gray folds of her brain, the clicks and screeches that would locate the lost little one if only there were sea between them instead of sky. So maybe, scientists think, when one is sick and in resignation dawdles in the short water where you can feel and see the sun, they all follow. Maybe they’re confused, maybe begging the ill member to return with them to the deep sea, but maybe they know their mother/daughter/cousin is done for and they’ve decided they can’t go on, that life after is too dim. That to wade into the shallows and let the tide take them away is better than a lifetime of calling out to their missing member and receiving only silence in return. Maybe that’s the message the beached bodies leave us: a tether works two ways.
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