This Country of Mothers

Description

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. 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