Still Life with Mother and Knife: Poems

by Chelsea Rathburn

In this powerful collection, Chelsea Rathburn seeks to voice matters once deemed unspeakable, from collisions between children and predators to the realities of postpartum depression. Still Life with Mother and Knife considers the female body, “mute and posable,” as object of both art and violence. Once an artist’s model, now a mother, Rathburn knows “how hard / it is to be held in the eyes of another.” Intimate and fearless, her poems move in interlocking sections between the pleasures and dangers of childhood, between masterpieces of art and magazine centerfolds, and―in a gripping sequence in dialogue with Delacroix’s paintings and sketches of Medea―between the twinned ferocities of maternal love and rage. With singular vision and potent poetic form, Rathburn crafts a complex portrait of girlhood and motherhood from which it is impossible to look away.

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Paperback

First published February 12, 2019

About the author

Chelsea Rathburn’s poetry collection A Raft of Grief was published in 2013 by Autumn House Press. Her first full-length collection of poetry, The Shifting Line, received the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award. She is also author of a limited-edition chapbook, Unused Lines, published by Aralia Press in 2003. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Ploughshares, New England Review, and Five Points, among other journals and anthologies, and her prose has appeared in Creative Nonfiction. She teaches English and creative writing at Young Harris College.

Chelsea's poem "After Filing for Divorce" was recently featured in Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry column at [http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/c...].

Reviews

[Paris (parisperusing) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to come (soon-ish), but very much a fan of Rathburn's work now, all thanks to the incredibly generous Kelly Forsythe (Perennial, 2018).

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems that focus on motherhood, womanhood, relationships, and identity.

from The Stitch: "At home, before the baby's first flutters / and kicks, I feel the stitch's tug and scrape, // the sharp and constant pinch a reminder / of the danger we'd escaped, the danger I was."

from Medee Furieuse, 1838: "Maybe all mothers murder their children's / innocence. In the painting, Medea holds / her boys so close they're one body again, / two cords she must cut. The children have no choice / but to love the hand that holds the knife."

from Praise Song: "they seem / to hate each other and the goats, / the woman radiating the kind / of disappointment I've taught myself / to hide"

[M Delea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great book I have read for #thesealeychallenge2023. This is Chelsea Rathburn's 3rd collection of poems, and I really enjoyed all of it.

Many of the poems are free verse, but she also employs meter and/or rhyme, as well as both traditional and nontraditional sonnets.

The book's sections are clear and made perfect sense to me (although most modern poetry books now have sections, many seem arbitrary). The overall theme of the book is motherhood, and each section is true to that while also examining other themes: growing up in Florida (Section 1), being pregnant and having a newborn (Section 2), art, mostly Delacroix (Section 3), nature and animals/the newborn is now a child (Section 4), and family life (Section 5). The last few poems also circle back to art, parents, high school, and other earlier topics.

I have many favorite poems, but here are a few: Introduction to Statistics; Introduction to Gerontology; Introduction to Sex Education; Not Child, The Corinthian Women; Praise Song; Shocks and Changes; and Self-Portrait in Wood or Stone or Air.

A few of my favorite bits: "The air alive and humming, like a bush
in flower throbbing with bees"
--Introduction to Desire

"Maybe all mothers murder their children's
innocence."
--Médée Furieuse, 1838

"The body of the deer was draped across the bank
like a melting Dali clock . . . "
--The Undertow

"This ruined castle slipping back to sand"
--At the Shore

Unequivocally recommend! #TheSealeyChallenge

[K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chelsea Rathburn was a speaker at a conference I attended last month, and her book Still Life with Mother and Knife is a book of poems written after the birth of Rathburn’s first child and in the aftermath of significant post-partum depression. It’s centered on mother daughter relationships, with Medea—who, in the Greek play named after her, kills her own two children—as a central symbol.

Favorite Quotation: “but I remembered/ sometimes how easy it was to slip/ free of the body, like stepping from a robe,/ and how certain I felt in that black space,/ my friends and the darkness calling me.”

[Kate Gaskin · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Chelsea Rathburn's Still Life with Mother and Knife, motherhood and girlhood expand and blur until they become inseparable. In four tightly self-contained sections, Rathburn journeys from girlhood to womanhood to motherhood, taking pains to look unflinchingly at the dangers and desires inherent in every stage of female life. Written mostly in fixed form, these poems boil with anger and love beneath their polished surfaces.

[eb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really great— the section that opens the book, where each poem is presented as Introduction to (X) was particularly powerful and worked well together. Still less convinced of the other sections in relation to each other or the overarching narrative, but loved the formal bent (Sonnets and sonnet-ish structures throughout). This book is quite slim as well, proving much can be said in an economical space

[Juliana Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't gravitate toward books about motherhood, but I loved this one. Rathburn avoids sentimentality and writes with a keen edge, looking at the dangers inherent in her own childhood, art, and becoming a mother. Several poems are absolutely gut-wrenching, and all of them are beautiful.

[Teresa Wong · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in this collection really resonated with me as a mother and as a writer.

[Stephen Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

‪5 stars - Impactive, empathic, sonorous poems. ‬

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant poems. Just brilliant.

[Christina Karvounis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stellar collection of poetry.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intense, beautiful poems about motherhood, art, womanhood, and how they all intersect.

[literaryelise · Rating 5 out of 5]

“and the shadows that look like monsters turn out to be / not the shadows of chairs or coatracks, but monster’s shadows.”

[Katy-Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somehow soul-crushing and soothing. This collection felt like a woman who understands.

[Violeta]

3.5 stars (3 stars for all sections except last, which I loved)