Having a Baby to Save a Marriage (Paperback or Softback)

In this astounding collection, Bledsoe builds a new world that is at once surprising, yet familiar, in the way that dreams so often are. “If you say the moon’s name/ when she’s full she will expect a foot/ rub and make a lot of pointed/ comments about her needs.” The world presented here has its own creation myth. Beauty and wisdom are found tucked into the most unexpected places, as in “What Poetry Is For,” which moves with agility from dust to mice to memories. These poems lodge in the reader’s memory; they’re “what we take with us that won’t fit/ in boxes.”

—Elizabeth MacDuffie, founding editor, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review

It is difficult to write about one’s children without sinking into sentimentality, but CL Bledsoe manages it with grace, wit, and humor. Beginning with the daughter’s difficult birth, he relates the simple daily activities and interactions between father and small child, by turns humorous, poignant, and wistful. You’ll want to join CL and daughter on this adventure.

—Gregory Luce, author of Riffs & Improvisations and Literary Editor, Bourgeon

On the surface, this is the story of a single father and daughter, from her mastery of his digital camera left around the house, to her radiant tangle of uncombable hair, to the quirky stories he tells her of mythical creatures. What’s more remarkable is that it’s really the father’s story. How he sustains himself through three jobs, no sleep, and anger from relatives. How his melancholy almost defeats him. Both are amazing stories, but it’s the second one that hits home with the pure accuracy of an arrow through a bullseye. I am incapacitated with the love and beauty of his portrayal, and I want nothing more.

—Donald Illich, author of Chance Bodies

The poems in Having a Baby to Save a Marriage are the roller-coaster of a man’s heart. A man navigating the brutal realities of 21st century America and the sluggish disappointments of post-divorce life, who finds himself enchanted by a small, magical creature who happens to be his daughter. Part love story, part fairy tale, part protective spell, Bledsoe writes as if his words are the crumbs for his daughter to follow out of the haunted forest. This lovely collection is testimony in its purest and most vulnerable form.

—Beth Gordon, author of This Small Machine of Prayer and The Water Cycle