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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.
“Julianna Baggott has a fierce imagination which probes the ordinary details of a woman's life and lights up both the sacred and profane. In a poem called ‘Blurbs,’ she half facetiously hopes for the words ‘sexy,’ ‘elegance,’ and ‘bite’ to be applied to her work. Happily, in this book, she earns all three.”—Linda Pastan, author of Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998
| Acknowledgments | ||
| How It Begins | 3 | |
| Kitchens: 1959 | 4 | |
| Conception | 6 | |
| The Cold War: My Parents as Newlyweds | 8 | |
| My Mother Gives Birth | 9 | |
| Correcting Memory | 13 | |
| The Knocking Tree | 15 | |
| Recalling the Leg | 16 | |
| Nights in Tijuana | 17 | |
| Learning to Say No at the Immaculate Conception High School | 19 | |
| First Time | 20 | |
| What We Didn't Talk about at Fifteen | 22 | |
| My Mother Refuses to Wear Glasses | 23 | |
| My Grandfather Returns after Many Year | 25 | |
| How I Fear God | 27 | |
| Coming Home at Seventeen | 28 | |
| My Mother's National Geographics | 30 | |
| The Annunciation: Our Mothers at Church | 32 | |
| After Giving Birth, I Recall the Madonna and Child | 35 | |
| First Pregnancy | 36 | |
| Satisfying the God of Statistics | 37 | |
| Preschool | 38 | |
| Seventy Degrees in December | 39 | |
| Checkup after the Operation to Evacuate the Dead Fetus | 41 | |
| You Found Me in the Dry Tub, Fevered, Whispering of God | 43 | |
| After the Miscarriage | 44 | |
| Mother as Judas | 45 | |
| The Pill | 46 | |
| Language Lab, Paris, 1989 | 47 | |
| After Eleven Days of Rain | 48 | |
| The Cow Remembers Urus | 49 | |
| Pharaoh's Dream | 50 | |
| My Daughter's Sight | 51 | |
| My Daughter, like Eve, Realizes Nakedness | 52 | |
| Cesarean | 54 | |
| What the Poets Could Have Been | 57 | |
| Blurbs | 59 | |
| Dear Mr. Houdini | 60 | |
| The Assumption: Mary's Heart in the Guinness Book of World Records | 61 | |
| What I Told the Jehovah's Witness | 63 | |
| Discussing Sorrow with Jesus | 64 | |
| My Cousin Attempts Suicide in Gander Hill Prison | 66 | |
| Jesus in the Mail | 67 | |
| On My Husband's Thirty-Third Birthday | 68 | |
| Living Where They Raised Me | 69 | |
| The Beginning | 70 | |
| The Dead Must Disappear or Join a Story | 71 | |
| My Mother among Bears | 75 | |
| My Mother Prays to Dream of Her Dead Father | 76 | |
| My Mother in the Garden | 78 | |
| Mummification | 79 | |
| The Extra Rib | 80 |
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, ...