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Mouths Open to Name Her: Poems
Mouths Open to Name Her: Poems in Bloomington, MN
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Size: Paperback
Mouths Open to Name Her
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Katie Bickham’s dazzling new collection, resounds with the intensity of new motherhood and confronts the relationship between mothers and their children, as she explores what it means to carry a child, even one conceived by rape or “a child born from no place, from the flame of her forgetting, / bracket of blank pages. The boy, too, was destined to forget— / a bird from no tree branch, fish from no river, sword from no forge.” Moving from the mid-1800s to 2017, these finely wrought poems grapple with how war, violence, and enslavement can disrupt our innocence. Bickham emphasizes the power of creation in spite of this: “Just picture them all,” she writes, “350,000 babies, together at once, / a city’s worth of them in a row or a circle or wrapped / in an acres-wide blanket, an army of innocence yawning / their first breaths over the globe, and the promise / that it will all happen again, just like this, just as imperfectly, / no matter what, / tomorrow.”
calls forth a global sisterhood that extends from Charleston, South Carolina, and Shreveport, Louisiana, to Nice, France; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the Serengeti District, Tanzania.
,
Katie Bickham’s dazzling new collection, resounds with the intensity of new motherhood and confronts the relationship between mothers and their children, as she explores what it means to carry a child, even one conceived by rape or “a child born from no place, from the flame of her forgetting, / bracket of blank pages. The boy, too, was destined to forget— / a bird from no tree branch, fish from no river, sword from no forge.” Moving from the mid-1800s to 2017, these finely wrought poems grapple with how war, violence, and enslavement can disrupt our innocence. Bickham emphasizes the power of creation in spite of this: “Just picture them all,” she writes, “350,000 babies, together at once, / a city’s worth of them in a row or a circle or wrapped / in an acres-wide blanket, an army of innocence yawning / their first breaths over the globe, and the promise / that it will all happen again, just like this, just as imperfectly, / no matter what, / tomorrow.”
calls forth a global sisterhood that extends from Charleston, South Carolina, and Shreveport, Louisiana, to Nice, France; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the Serengeti District, Tanzania.
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