This Country of Mothers

This Country of Mothers

by Julianna Baggott
This Country of Mothers

This Country of Mothers

by Julianna Baggott

Paperback(1st Edition)

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Overview

A mosaic of memories, the poems of This Country of Mothers recollect Julianna Baggott’s experiences as both mother and daughter. With wit, compassion, aggression, and anxiety, Baggott examines her maternal history. She recalls moments of creation and destruction in her life, times of elation and of desperation that mold her as both a woman and a poet. This affecting study of motherhood is framed in issues of Catholicism and of poetry itself, challenging and espousing the roles of both. Throughout her poems, Baggott’s personal experiences embrace universal themes to birth poems in a language and style that is both powerfully feminine and accessibly human.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780809323814
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date: 04/10/2001
Series: Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Edition description: 1st Edition
Pages: 96
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.27(d)

About the Author

Julianna Baggott received her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has held fellowships and scholarships from the Delaware Division of Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The Southern Review, and Best American Poetry 2000. She is the author of Girl Talk, a novel, which has been translated into five languages. She lives in Delaware with her husband and three children.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgmentsxi
1
How It Begins3
Kitchens: 19594
Conception6
The Cold War: My Parents as Newlyweds8
My Mother Gives Birth9
2
Correcting Memory13
The Knocking Tree15
Recalling the Leg16
Nights in Tijuana17
Learning to Say No at the Immaculate Conception High School19
First Time20
What We Didn't Talk about at Fifteen22
My Mother Refuses to Wear Glasses23
My Grandfather Returns after Many Years25
How I Fear God27
Coming Home at Seventeen28
My Mother's National Geographics30
The Annunciation: Our Mothers at Church32
3
After Giving Birth, I Recall the Madonna and Child35
First Pregnancy36
Satisfying the God of Statistics37
Preschool38
Seventy Degrees in December39
Checkup after the Operation to Evacuate the Dead Fetus41
You Found Me in the Dry Tub, Fevered, Whispering of God43
After the Miscarriage44
Mother as Judas45
The Pill46
Language Lab, Paris, 198947
After Eleven Days of Rain48
The Cow Remembers Urus49
Pharaoh's Dream50
My Daughter's Sight51
My Daughter, like Eve, Realizes Nakedness52
Cesarean54
4
What the Poets Could Have Been57
Blurbs59
Dear Mr. Houdini60
The Assumption: Mary's Heart in the Guinness Book of World Records61
What I Told the Jehovah's Witness63
Discussing Sorrow with Jesus64
My Cousin Attempts Suicide in Gander Hill Prison66
Jesus in the Mail67
On My Husband's Thirty-Third Birthday68
Living Where They Raised Me69
The Beginning70
The Dead Must Disappear or Join a Story71
5
My Mother among Bears75
My Mother Prays to Dream of Her Dead Father76
My Mother in the Garden78
Mummification79
The Extra Rib80
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