Not For Mothers Only - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0977106489 ISBN 13: 9780977106486

Publisher: Fence Books, 2007

Synopsis

"The poets in this anthology have been ravished, whacked, illuminated, blown away by the experience of motherhood. The thousand experiences. The thousand interruptions. The fact that it is never what we expected, and that it is overwhelmingly intense."—Alicia Ostriker, from the foreword

About this title

About the Author

CATHERINE WAGNER is the author of two books of poems, Miss America and Macular Hole. She is the winner of the Ruth Lilly Prize and was a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, she currently lives in Oxford, Ohio, where she has recently joined the faculty at Miami University.

REBECCA WOLFF is founding editor and publisher of Fence and Fence Books. She is also the author of two books of poems, Manderley and Figment, which won the National Poetry Series and the Barnard Women Poets Prize, respectively. She was born and raised in New York City and attended Bennington College, UMass Amherst, and the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, as well as doing a brief stint at the University of Houston. She lives in Athens, New York, and teaches at the New School.

From The Washington Post

Just in time for Mothers' Day comes this anthology of poems about the experience of motherhood, or "the thousand experiences, the thousand interruptions," as poet Alicia Ostriker writes in the foreword. Edited by two friends who met in the early 1990s at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Not for Mothers Only collects poems on a range of subjects under the motherhood umbrella, some intimate and personal, others historical and political.

Among the contributors are well-known poets (Adrienne Rich, Carolyn Forché, Sharon Olds, for example) and emerging ones (most are likely to be new to readers). There's very little in the way of helpful structuring: The contributors are not arranged thematically, but according to the arrival of their first child.

Catherine Wagner, in the introduction, calls this book a "comforting corrective to those who feel isolated as mother-artists," and Rebecca Wolff notes that "poets who are mothers" often get asked, "How has being a mother changed your writing?" Her own response is "brutally literal . . . pragmatic as a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich on allergen-free bread": "My poems are a lot shorter now."

Not for Mothers Only is an odd title for a poetry anthology that seems to be precisely for mothers; it's wishful thinking on the part of the editors that anyone else is going to be much interested in an anthology dealing with the "life-changing joys and rigors of motherhood." Still, lovely language abounds in these pages and provocative phrases, and, as Eddy Arnold used to sing, "Put them all together, they spell Mother, a word that means the world to me."

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fence Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0977106489
• ISBN 13: 9780977106486
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 546
• Editor: Wagner Catherine, Wolff Rebecca