This Country of Mothers

by Julianna Baggott

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:	9780809390274
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	04/10/2001
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	1 MB

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

Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments One How It Begins Kitchens: 1959 Conception The Cold War: My Parents as Newlyweds My Mother Gives Birth Two Correcting Memory The Knocking Tree Recalling the Leg Nights in Tijuana Learning to Say No at the Immaculate Conception High School First Time What We Didn't Talk about at Fifteen My Mother Refuses to Wear Glasses My Grandfather Returns after Many Years How I Fear God Coming Home at Seventeen My Mother’s National Geographics The Annunciation: Our Mothers at Church Three After Giving Birth, I Recall the Madonna and Child First Pregnancy Satisfying the God of Statistics Preschool Seventy Degrees in December Checkup after the Operation to Evacuate the Dead Fetus You Found Me in the Dry Tub, Fevered, Whispering of God After the Miscarriage Mother as Judas The Pill Language Lab, Paris, 1989 After Eleven Days of Rain The Cow Remembers Urus Pharaoh’s Dream My Daughter’s Sight My Daughter, like Eve, Realizes Nakedness Cesarean Four What the Poets Could Have Been Blurbs Dear Mr.Houdini, The Assumption: Mary’s Heart in the Guinness Book of World Records What I Told the Jehovah’s Witness Discussing Sorrow with Jesus My Cousin Attempts Suicide in Gander Hill Prison Jesus in the Mail On My Husband's Thirty-Third Birthday Living Where They Raised Me The Beginning The Dead Must Disappear or Join a Story Five My Mother among Bears My Mother Prays to Dream of Her Dead Father My Mother in the Garden Mummification The Extra Rib Also in the Series Back Cover

Editorial Reviews

“Against a backdrop of family stories, Julianna Baggott draws themes as sharp as razors. She is an accomplished poet of the eye and ear, of the definitive feminine experience, and her poems of private life are expansive enough to suggest a vision of a political and historical era. If Baggott's large subject is memory and, especially, its defaults, the clarity that so many of her characters seek to deny is her great virtue. Poems like “The Annunciation: Our Mothers at Church” and “The Dead Must Disappear or Join a Story” might be admired exclusively for their technical skills, but they are also marvelously accessible. This Country of Mothers announces a poet of substantial powers.”—Rodney Jones, author of Elegy for the Southern Drawl

“In Julianna Baggott's This Country of Mothers, a distant and uncaring god is always near. Baggott's world is haunted by blood, miscarriage, suicide, and family love—and set against the world of the Bible. In one striking poem the speaker embarrasses and tires Jesus himself by telling him how ‘a woman resigns herself to joy’ because she knows her body will be ‘ripped open’ in childbirth. And when Jesus, exhausted by her rant (‘I've gone too far’), lies down on the sofa, she covers him with a white sheet and takes care of him. In these large, passionate, compelling poems, the speaker's family and the holy family merge in love and suffering—wholly family, wholly loved, wholly suffered for.”—Andrew Hudgins, author of Babylon in a Jar: New Poems

“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

From the Publisher