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The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood
The Long Devotion is a collection of poems, essays, and writing prompts that celebrates motherhood and creates a space, as poet Molly Spencer has written, to “tell an unlovely truth about family life and not have to take it back.”
The poets in this book represent and describe a wide range of experiences. They write about encountering the world anew through their children; intersections of parenting and race; single parenting; adoptive, foster, and step-parenting; life with chronic illness, mental illness, and disability; and the choice to remain childless. The book is divided into four parts. “Difficulty, Ambivalence, and Joy” considers the wonder and challenges of parenting—including infertility, pregnancy, miscarriage, and life with children—and trying to write in the midst of those demands. “The Body and the Brain” explores the cerebral and bodily labor of caregiving and writing. “In the World” brings parents and their children into contact with the natural and political landscape. Finally, “Transitions” looks at how parenting and writing change as children grow up. Poems range from linear narratives and imagistic lyric to poetry comics, speculative futures, and experimental forms. Essays and poems suggest ways to write through the disruptions and chaos of family life. Prompts invite readers to use the work in this book as a starting point for their own poetry.
As candid accounts of motherhood become more prevalent across literary, pop culture, and digital spaces, the way we talk about writing and mothering is changing. Poets have long challenged traditional motherhood narratives. This book brings together a new generation of exciting and provocative voices for the first time.
The poets in this book represent and describe a wide range of experiences. They write about encountering the world anew through their children; intersections of parenting and race; single parenting; adoptive, foster, and step-parenting; life with chronic illness, mental illness, and disability; and the choice to remain childless. The book is divided into four parts. “Difficulty, Ambivalence, and Joy” considers the wonder and challenges of parenting—including infertility, pregnancy, miscarriage, and life with children—and trying to write in the midst of those demands. “The Body and the Brain” explores the cerebral and bodily labor of caregiving and writing. “In the World” brings parents and their children into contact with the natural and political landscape. Finally, “Transitions” looks at how parenting and writing change as children grow up. Poems range from linear narratives and imagistic lyric to poetry comics, speculative futures, and experimental forms. Essays and poems suggest ways to write through the disruptions and chaos of family life. Prompts invite readers to use the work in this book as a starting point for their own poetry.
As candid accounts of motherhood become more prevalent across literary, pop culture, and digital spaces, the way we talk about writing and mothering is changing. Poets have long challenged traditional motherhood narratives. This book brings together a new generation of exciting and provocative voices for the first time.
229 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 16, 2022
Just a spectacular anthology from start to finish. I dog-earred so many pages that I will read again and again. I loved the wide range of writers and topics, and I appreciate the writing prompts between each section.
It delights me that the anthology includes so many poems by Sustainable Arts Foundation awardees, including Lauren Haldeman, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Remica Bingham-Risher, Victoria Chang, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Camille Dungy, Chanda Feldman, Catherine Pierce, Maggie Smith, Alison Stine, Rachel Zucker, not to mention editor Nancy Reddy. She and coeditor Emily Perez have created a book that is a terrific argument for the power, possibility, and necessity of mother writing. As Emari Digiorgio writes in “In Words in the Air: On Audio Drafting”: “To be the mother I wanted to be, I had to be the writer I wanted to be, too."
Here are just some of the lines and images that stopped me in my tracks:
Kendra Decolo, I Pump Milk Like a Boss
I pump like I’m writing my name in blood
which turns to the milk my child sucks dry, which she turns into blood.
Beth Ann Fennelly, Latching On, Falling Off
lV. It Was a Strange Country
where I lived with my daughter while I fed her
from my body. It was a small country, an island for two,
and there were things we couldn’t bring with us,
like her father. He watched from the far shore,
well meaning, useless. …
We didn’t get many tourists, much news—
behind the closed curtains, rocking in the chair,
the world was a rumor all summer.
Then came spring and her milk teeth and her bones
longer in my lap, her feet dangling, and rapt,
she watched me eat, scholar of sandwiches and water.
Carrie Fountain’s To White Noise
O my digital sister, thank
you, thank you for keeping
the children from climbing
over the fence of sleep.
Jasminne Mendez, Again
I’ve lost. Too many. Things. To become a mother. Things. I would not have given up. Had I. Known. She is my breath. My body. Her body. I wouldn’t give that up. Now. But no. I wouldn’t. Won’t. Can’t. Don’t want to. Do it. Again.
And finally Molly Spencer, in "I Stop Writing the Poem: On Motherhood and the Writing Life":
If we make writing into something that requires waiting for a half-conscious state to occur in a space set apart and holy, we miss out on the kind of art made in the messy, material, fragmented, actual, ten-minutes-at-a-time world where we live. We also devalue, if not exclude, from our concept of what makes a "writer" those who don't have time to wait for a trance, who don't have space in their homes or their lives for writing, let alone a sanctified space....I hope writers...will write, not in the absence of obstacles, but in the pits and gullies around and through them. Not from inspiration in the language of the Muse, but from their daily lives in the language of stovetops and bodies and brooms and blood. And interruptions."
It delights me that the anthology includes so many poems by Sustainable Arts Foundation awardees, including Lauren Haldeman, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Remica Bingham-Risher, Victoria Chang, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Camille Dungy, Chanda Feldman, Catherine Pierce, Maggie Smith, Alison Stine, Rachel Zucker, not to mention editor Nancy Reddy. She and coeditor Emily Perez have created a book that is a terrific argument for the power, possibility, and necessity of mother writing. As Emari Digiorgio writes in “In Words in the Air: On Audio Drafting”: “To be the mother I wanted to be, I had to be the writer I wanted to be, too."
Here are just some of the lines and images that stopped me in my tracks:
Kendra Decolo, I Pump Milk Like a Boss
I pump like I’m writing my name in blood
which turns to the milk my child sucks dry, which she turns into blood.
Beth Ann Fennelly, Latching On, Falling Off
lV. It Was a Strange Country
where I lived with my daughter while I fed her
from my body. It was a small country, an island for two,
and there were things we couldn’t bring with us,
like her father. He watched from the far shore,
well meaning, useless. …
We didn’t get many tourists, much news—
behind the closed curtains, rocking in the chair,
the world was a rumor all summer.
Then came spring and her milk teeth and her bones
longer in my lap, her feet dangling, and rapt,
she watched me eat, scholar of sandwiches and water.
Carrie Fountain’s To White Noise
O my digital sister, thank
you, thank you for keeping
the children from climbing
over the fence of sleep.
Jasminne Mendez, Again
I’ve lost. Too many. Things. To become a mother. Things. I would not have given up. Had I. Known. She is my breath. My body. Her body. I wouldn’t give that up. Now. But no. I wouldn’t. Won’t. Can’t. Don’t want to. Do it. Again.
And finally Molly Spencer, in "I Stop Writing the Poem: On Motherhood and the Writing Life":
If we make writing into something that requires waiting for a half-conscious state to occur in a space set apart and holy, we miss out on the kind of art made in the messy, material, fragmented, actual, ten-minutes-at-a-time world where we live. We also devalue, if not exclude, from our concept of what makes a "writer" those who don't have time to wait for a trance, who don't have space in their homes or their lives for writing, let alone a sanctified space....I hope writers...will write, not in the absence of obstacles, but in the pits and gullies around and through them. Not from inspiration in the language of the Muse, but from their daily lives in the language of stovetops and bodies and brooms and blood. And interruptions."
September 15, 2022
I’m typically not a poetry fan. I read this art form infrequently, and as such feel that I’m not the most qualified to give a review on this book. That being said, what I enjoyed about this collection was the reading of a variety of motherhood experiences shaped and delivered in a variety of ways. It was these - often very different - expressions of the mothering experience that I enjoyed so greatly and I would highly recommend.
April 5, 2022
I loved so many poems in this anthology (established favorites and new discoveries) but what I most appreciated was the curated range of experiences and perspectives of motherhood/poetry. I would have been so inspired and encouraged to come across this book sixteen years ago, when I became a mom; I’m so grateful it exists now.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews