Know the Mother

Know the Mother

by Desiree Cooper
Know the Mother

Know the Mother

by Desiree Cooper

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Overview

Short, searing glimpses of how race and gender shadow even the most intimate moments of women’s lives.

While a mother can be defined as a creator, a nurturer, a protector—at the center of each mother is an individual who is attempting to manage her own fears, desires, and responsibilities in different and sometimes unexpected ways. In Know the Mother, author Desiree Cooper explores the complex archetype of the mother in all of her incarnations. In a collage of meditative stories, women—both black and white—find themselves wedged between their own yearnings and their roles as daughters, sisters, grandmothers, and wives.

In this heart-wrenching collection, Cooper reveals that gender and race are often unanticipated interlopers in family life. An anxious mother reflects on her prenatal fantasies of suicide while waiting for her daughter to come home late one night. A lawyer miscarries during a conference call and must proceed as though nothing has happened. On a rare night out with her husband, a new mother tries convincing herself that everything is still the same. A politician's wife's thoughts turn to slavery as she contemplates her own escape: "Even Harriet Tubman had realized that freedom wasn't worth the price of abandoning her family, so she'd come back home. She'd risked it all for love." With her lyrical and carefully crafted prose, Cooper's stories provide truths without sermon and invite empathy without sentimentality.

Know the Mother explores the intersection of race and gender in vignettes that pull you in and then are gone in an instant. Readers of short fiction will appreciate this deeply felt collection.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780814341506
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Publication date: 03/13/2016
Series: Made in Michigan Writers Series
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 112
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

A 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, Desiree Cooper is a former attorney, Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist, and Detroit community activist. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Callaloo, Detroit Noir, Best African American Fiction 2010, and Tidal Basin Review, among other online and print publications. Cooper was a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for emerging black poets, and she is a Kimbilio fellow, a national residency for African American fiction writers.

What People are Saying About This

Angela Flournoy of the Turner House

The stories in Know the Mother are like jewels—glittering, finely wrought and worthy of careful appraisal. Here is fiction that examines not only the everyday messiness of living but the painful miracle of birth and the beautiful mystery of death with equal insight. Cooper's elegant, wise, and energetic collection is about what it means to be a woman, a mother, a sister, a wife, a child, and most of all, human.

Toi Derricotte of the Undertaker's Daughter and Recipient of a Guggenheim and Two National Endowmen

Each one of these short, short stories is as full of excitement, triumphs, and losses as a movie or novel but as easy to swallow and as satisfying as bonbons. A perfect bedtime accompaniment, Know the Mother is a great gift for friends. Cooper shines a brilliant light on the everyday, on the little things as real, and as unexpected, as the opening of our hearts.

Internationally Acclaimed Spiritual Teacher and Author of a Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Cours - Marianne Williamson

Every once in a while you read a book and it blows you away. KNOW THE MOTHER was that for me.

Camille T. Dungy of Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race

Are short stories your thing? Consider Desiree Cooper's collection of taut flash fiction, Know the Mother. A journalist by training, Cooper efficiently delivers all that's needed to move a reader.

Colleen J. McElroy of Blood Memory

Desiree Cooper's Know the Mother is a collection of thirty vignettes that examine how migrations changed the fabric of families and particularly motherhood. Young women had to make their own way - to forge for themselves the demarcation between home and the outside world, what was expected of them, and what goals they had to live up to. Motherhood was no longer cast in the direct shadow of grandmothers, and mothers-in-law, but rather shaped by the social and cultural biases of racism and sexism through which they navigated, seemingly alone. If motherhood was the icing on the cake, she held together what was under that icing. Should the mother remain unchanged, a fixer or a giver commanded merely by her role?

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