American Bitch

In these poems about pregnancy, family history, American culture, religious life, anti-Semitism, the ever-present patriarchy, and poetry itself, all the emotions and reflections are entirely raw. Still, every word is carefully chosen, every poem beautifully crafted. We, the readers, listen to a mother talking to the child still inside her womb: For now, while you are another/ hungry organ inside of me, I give you/ a tour of this city. You’ll one day learn/ too how to love something broken, and we do it, too. We love the brokenness that Rae Hoffman Jager makes us face in American Bitch, one extraordinary text after another.

Manuel Iris

Early in American Bitch, Rae Hoffman Jager ponders “How do you explain / that one puncture is all it takes / to make a vacuum,” and throughout the collection we see those punctures pile up—in sexual violence, in unsustainable climate change, in the cruelty of men and the systems that reward that cruelty. But within all of this there is also the hope we will survive; despite what our own myths say about ourselves, the narrator tells her unborn child “You’ll one day learn / too how to love something broken.” Whether it’s meditations on Judaism, football, or motherhood, Jager states “if I can celebrate anything, I will.” And she does in this important new collection.

Erin Elizabeth Smith, author of Down

Rae Hoffman Jager’s American Bitch is a love song to the unlikely pairing of mothering and football, a dirge against a warming/weirding planet, anti-Semitism, and the oppressive and ever-present patriarchy. In “Wreaked,” Jager reminds us that “while we slept, made oatmeal ... a crack in the ice shelf grew eleven miles.” These are ferociously tender and tenderly ferocious poems. We’re reminded there are “razors in the bathroom, / bleach beneath the kitchen sink,” but also cardinals to admire, a chance to “see who is wooing who, [to] count how many fragile talons can fit /on one branch.” Cities are flooding and burning, “everything feels as heavy as a Magnolia Blossom’s smell,” yet there’s the miracle of birth, a daughter who “came into this world fist first.” Someone or something is always harshing her buzz, yet the speaker’s determination to thrive is palpable: “I’ll play the guitar. My daughter will shake a musical egg.” American Bitch is the book to turn to as the droughts worsen and the seas rise.

Martha Silano