Still Life with Mother and Knife: Poems (Sea Cliff Fund) - Softcover

Rathburn, Chelsea

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807169749 ISBN 13: 9780807169742

Publisher: LSU Press, 2019

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three previous books of poetry, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award in Poetry. Raised in Miami, she now lives in Macon, Georgia, and teaches at Mercer University. Since 2019, she has served as the poet laureate of Georgia.

From the Back Cover

"In Still Life with Mother and Knife, Chelsea Rathburn tells us that we inhabit our own fairy tales, and we have to learn to walk alone in the woods--the briary forests of adolescence, the dark drifts of motherhood, and then the lonely sands of old age. What is beauty? she asks. What is love? In her incandescent Introductions, she contemplates the many ways we discover the world with its chiaroscuro of good and evil, the known and unknown, love and hatred. A deeply felt chronicle of the passage from childhood into full womanhood."

--Barbara Hamby

From the Inside Flap

LSU Press Paperback Original
Poetry

Published with the assistance of the Sea Cliff Fund

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

And I looked nothing like the women
splayed across Art through the Ages,
my body narrow, small-breasted, nothing
like those virgin mothers, bathers,
and concubines, all of them busty
and glowing, all of them inviting
or avoiding the viewer’s eye. Who was
to be my model? I who never
knew exactly where to look, or what
to do with all my grief and anger,
or where to put my restless hands.

―from “Introduction to Art History”

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807169749
• ISBN 13: 9780807169742
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 84