Book of Mother is an exploration of mother/son relationship and consciousness (as these are entered and left). This book is an intimate encounter with dementia as lived experience. Words are an important way into the world and when we begin to lose them we find ourselves with fewer tools and fewer familiar signs to go by. Phrases lost and tip-of-the-tongue half-forgettings - loose threads like these belong to the everyday business of knowing who we are. They are also the nuts and bolts of Kit Kelen's poetry. A long play record of memory and its tricks, one comes to and from Book of Mother with always some questions about who is talking to whom, about when we are where, about whether we wake or dream.
Christopher (Kit) Kelen is a poet and painter, resident in the Myall Lakes of NSW. Published widely since the seventies, he has more than a dozen full length collections in English as well as translated poetry books, published around the world, in Chinese, Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, Indonesian, Swedish, Norwegian, Filipino and Greek. Kit Kelen was one of the awarded poets in the 2021 Newcastle Poetry Prize.