too many words begins by examining the poet’s literacy in relation to her mother. The “bending stiffness” of the first section leans into “mourning light” as “our keening” and “our saving” chart a path for reading as healing. This chapbook is available from above/ground press. See a full review here.
bending stiffness
if your mother is a feather, mine is a stone
thrown at streetlights to test aim
her arm, I am her broom here to sweep up
broken depression glass fused by her mother’s
tongue. my mother’s thumb opens any book
riffles pages then closes its cover for good:
“too many words” — she’d rather I help refurbish
cane chairs than ransack passages for new verbs
if my mother were a feather, I’d be the vane’s
arms, asymmetrical for flight:
our interlocking hooklets a zone of overlap —
a foil (our mechanical wearing a weariness)
molting often as sunlight hastens us
”too many words, these hard-wrought sutras to your mother's memory (and beyond), strike such a balance; not trying to represent (your ma sounds like she wouldn't suffer representation gladly!) but portraying that space between you two… so tenderly. I find it heartening the way you've been able to tell of shared imperatives: the creating: the impulse and pulse of sewing, whittling, amalgamating: providing light for these parallels that make up an inheritance in acts of replication and deviation.” Edric Mesmer, Poems now & then and of mono dies & homo phony.
“Ultimately it is new proximities to others that balance out the harshness of the carried past, the kindness of the father that balances out the meanness of the mother, the rituals performed over and over at the site of other deaths, and the need to move and escape both the place and the belonging to which and through which family creates ties, that balance out the scraping drag of inheritance. In a “communal effort to connect / as in sharing gains and losses” Anderson Moseman writes, “we become water in motion / hoping others can open words anew”: she favours “motion not nation.” Jérôme Melançon, Bridges Under the Water and Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright.