Mouths Open to Name Her: Poems

Mouths Open to Name Her, Katie Bickham’s dazzling new collection, resounds with the intensity of new motherhood and confronts the relationship between mothers and their children, as she explores what it means to carry a child, even one conceived by rape or “a child born from no place, from the flame of her forgetting, / bracket of blank pages. The boy, too, was destined to forget— / a bird from no tree branch, fish from no river, sword from no forge.” Moving from the mid-1800s to 2017, thes...