Motherfish by Barbara G. S. Hagerty

In MOTHERFISH, Barbara Hagerty asks the essential question: how do mothers both define and defy our understandings of this life? “Mother breathed through gills,” the title poem describes, “swam golden loopholes/in the pool.” The impulse to honor our elders is counterweighted by a compulsion to exceed them. We wait “to be cut like a kite/from my mother’s string,” and yet we mourn the failed aerial acts that come with aging.

Garmented in rich metaphor, grounded in quotidian judgment (“don’t underestimate my body’s camera”), Hagerty creates a sympathetic speaker who explores the world as child and parent. Appropriating a son’s bedroom as a studio, who knows what mix of dusty innocence and spent experience waits under the bed? While a daughter flies to the Orient, the paring knife stays home to “carve latitudes,/felling onions in concentric rings.” Though the voice of these poems is nurturing it is also wry and sexy, with a buzz worthy of any “bee drunk on the dregs of limoncello” and an artist’s eye for image. I truly enjoyed this smart, thoughtful collection.

–Sandra Beasley, author of I WAS THE JUKEBOX (W.W. Norton & Company)

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]