Grasp This Salt by Erin Kae

“Who are we to one another? Erin Kae‘s insistent, unsettling poems find ways to listen, to imagine and care, where most of us would pass by unthinking, would make a monster of a person. An unforgettable new voice has arrived.”

–Lytton Smith, author of My Radar Data Knows Its Thing (Foundlings Press, 2018)

“What does it mean to try to understand our own mother’s experience of mothering us? Or to try to understand another mother’s experience of mothering? Erin Kae’s unflinching debut imagines what it means to be a tourist in the city of a mother’s unimaginable decisions. Through a cycle of sharply wrought elegies, Kae investigates the complexity of motherhood through the closed car windows of the Susan Smith trials. The poems deftly refract Smith’s voice through time—before mothering, in the act of mothering, in the act of watching or not watching, in the moment of inventing the black man she blames (whose own voice rises to the surface of the lake through Cornelius Eady’s rendering of this racism). Nestled inside Smith’s crime is the voice of a mother of a toddler named Erin who keeps playing at drowning, alongside a Greek choir at the trial ready to let us in on the sins of a woman who would kill her own children. The poems in Grasp This Salt are beautiful and frightening, unafraid to grasp at miscarriage, murder, and whether we can make sense of violent death—to look behind the curtains left open “for neighbors to know there is nothing to see here.” Through intricate form Kae’s collection never loses sight of the ways the public might want a mother to suffer for her decisions, but she also knows that only the Lake Birds Observing Brutal Imagination “know best, who comes and goes from the lake.” These are fierce lyrics of violence and of mothering.”

–Cori A. Winrock, author of Little Envelope of Earth Conditions (Alice James, forthcoming)