Kitchen Table Midwife of the Dispossessed by ruth mota

Over fifty of Ruth Mota‘s poems have been published in online and print poetry journals including: The Atlanta Review, Gyroscope Review, Terrapin Books and Duo. Kitchen Table Midwife of the Dispossessed is her first chapbook. Ruth Mota currently lives in Santa Cruz, California with her Brazilian husband.

Previously she resided nearly a decade in northeast Brazil and worked as an international HIV/AIDS trainer throughout Africa and Latin America. She was first drawn to Spanish language and culture when she heard a Spaniard read from Lorca’s Bodas de Sangre in her English class at Oberlin College. Lorca’s passion continues to resonate with her as she reflects on her diverse experiences with dispossessed people at her kitchen table.

PRAISE:

 

Bursting with brilliant and sensual metaphor, Ruth Mota‘s poems hold the reader as close as the embrace of domesticity while taking us to locations as diverse as the Yuma Border Facility, Brazil and the Amazon. From cooking chicken to throwing a palm leaf, Mota’s poems surprise at every turn. With nothing taken at face value, alive with wonders as in “Birthing at the Center of the Earth” where we meet “the ageless midwife of the Amazon”… “her fingers knotted/ as the roots of ceiba trees slide/ round the uterus, swivel the wandering babe.” In “Bridge Over the Capiberibe” we encounter “the stench of injustice…rising” and throughout there is a movement toward greater consciousness and awareness, knowledge and inner knowing. In “Instructions on Roofing” we hear, “what is there but to try?” In “Evening Song”, one of the final poems in the collection, “there was such a thing as beauty/and we entered it.” These poems will both arouse and comfort.

–Magdalena Montagne