Handbook for Unwell Mothers by Jill Crammond

In Handbook for Unwell Mothers, Jill Crammond‘s poems turn motherhood on its head, shake it up, and pop the cork. When the second stanza you read is, It is morning in the gingerbread house/and no-one has eaten the children yet,you know you are in for some fantastic and engaging work. Crammond’s voice is like no other—funny, dark, powerful, honest, vulnerable—she continually engages the reader with playful language as well as giving a few nods to poetry’s past such as William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and even Mary Oliver with the humorous, After the second glass of wine/you will know/what it is you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life. This is a book I could not set down. If you are ready for an exuberant ride into the lives of women, Mary, ex-wives, children you may want to devour, and mothers who could have #MotherhoodForRealz tattooed on their back, read this book. Highly recommended for anyone who is a mother or anyone who was born from one. Pop the champagne, this book is so bubbly and refreshing!

–Kelli Russell Agodon, Dialogues with Rising Tides(Copper Canyon Press)

Like the Fractured Fairy Tales I loved so well, Jill Crammond‘s startling poems twist the old stories of motherhood until they crack, and let in both light and darkness. Archetypes of Mary, Jane, Barbie, and the witch are all delightfully re-envisioned here. I wish I‘d had this slim guide of how to survive divorce and single motherhood sooner. Give it to all your friends. You never know when they might need it. 

–Barbara Ungar

“Say the word mother enough times it becomes other, ” Jill Crammond writes in her chapbook Handbook for Unwell Mothers which confronts the mythos and mysticism of motherhood. This stunning and surreal chapbook flings open “windows closed tight from the truth” to show how close the darkness and domesticity sit. Crammond deconstructs the fairytale of motherhood to show the way mothers are perceived as: witch, object, prey. Through Crammond’s impeccable worldbuilding, here mothers  “[wear] the weight of yesterday’s mascara,” “dress the children in napkins,” and [forgive] the plates their stains,” as they confront isolation and subjugation from homes, men and even their children. This book, glittered with haunt, offers the danger and power “of a mothering.. that doesn’t mother.”

–Kelly Grace Thomas, author of Boat Burned