The poems in Rachel J. Bennett's debut full-length collection, Mothers & Other Fairytales, draw on folkloric images and themes to map the absence of a mother in the poet's life. The poems also move toward and through the poet herself becoming a mother, navigating the idea of mother from different angles-personal and collective, typecast and inhabited. This narratively propulsive, poignant collection explores what it is to be both parent and child and asks how what we bequeath can be different from what we have inherited.
Lynn Melnick, author of Refusenik, writes: With delicate complexity, Bennett dives deep into the myths and realities of mothering and being mothered: "I was / half-man, half-beast, / and both parts were so gentle, / who would believe it?" The poems in Mothers & Other Fairytales are quietly gutsy and absolutely rousing in the brilliance of their music. Bennett refuses to fall back on the familiar tropes of motherhood, creating her own with grace, wisdom, and beauty. This book reads like a novel in its narrative propulsion but lands as all good poetry lands, right at the heart.
Kate Colby, author of Reverse Engineer, adds: In gripping poems that explore the abject love and terror of being a mother and a daughter, Bennett evinces the instabilities and possibilities of our deepest human connections. Using language as a paradoxical site of presence and persistent absence, she deftly harnesses the mutual exclusions of our words and momentary worlds, where "...days / exist less when / you're not speaking." Mothers & Other Fairytales evokes the wolf at the door of our days, and speaks to the unspeakable in beautifully crafted lines whose haunting effects linger.
B.K. Fischer, author of Ceive, concludes: The mother and the mother's absence are both characters in these adroit poems, chiseled lyrics that don't reach for the mythic so much as succumb to it: "The girl with a mother throws the mother / to the ground as she runs, and / the mother becomes a mirror, the mother becomes / a forest." Emerging from this penumbral space, the mother's experiences of pregnancy, birth, and early parenting become lexical sieves, grammatical experiences, and the poems arrive at stunning insights into the condition of maternal embodiment, which is to say, the human condition: "A body is not a castle-it's a snowball, / starting from very little. It stretches like a piece // of music around its listeners, forgets / itself, carouses within a history of // devastation." Mothers & Other Fairytales brings motif and blood into one silhouette, a figure illuminated and animated by the language of its own making.