Re-Membering by Alice A. Hildebrand

I was deeply moved by Alice Hildebrand’s poems about her mother and her family, as I am always moved by her sermons.

One of my favorite pastors is also a fine poet.

–Bill Henderson, recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award and editor of the annual Pushcart Prize series, and the author of six memoirs, including Simple Gifts and Cathedral.

Re-membering is a courageous and evocative book. Alice Hildebrand examines the complicated and profound bonds of mother and daughter, through what she calls in one poem the “undoing of her mother’s life.” She skillfully intertwines her multiple roles of daughter, caretaker, and mourner throughout these poems, and we come to see how love evolves, becoming what it needs to be. She takes us on a spiritual journey that transforms her and us as well.

–Stuart Kestenbaum, Maine poet laureate 2016-21, and author of five collections of poems, including Prayers & Run-on Sentences; and How to Start Over

Perfect pearls of intimacy and wisdom, Hildebrand’s poems dive down as we discover “the beads lie in the hollow of my collarbones just as they lay in hers” in the “The Necklace.” Re-Membering holds poems far below the surface where the complex yet loving connections between mother and daughter are found. From the conceit of crows— “You believed your voice to be unbeautiful, /so you sang loudly instead”—to autumn, the season in which the “undoing of my mother’s life, /it becomes autumn…unpinning itself,” each poem reveals that moment “where childhood sleeps between the wings and feathers of the mother birds.” Seldom do we find a book of poetry so coherently, so lyrically connected and shining like that string of pearls.

–Nancy Avery Dafoe, author of Naimah and Ajmal on Newton’s Mountain and nine other books