Somewhere Like You by Jennifer S. Flescher

Jennifer Flescher‘s poems move between a prose that is blunt yet intimate, and lines so sharply honed they hurt. Her subject is the difficulty that is living, and how this already complex matter is then complicated by motherhood. The child’s sorrow mirrors the mother’s, a mother who mirrors her own mother, and one senses the delicate helix of their DNA spiraling upwards, as a plant slowly turns its growth toward the sun. I am grateful for the humane spirit that infuses these poems and thankful for their simple beauty.

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Somewhere Like You is an ethereal unraveling, painfully rational gathering of thoughtpoems in pursuit of balancing the enormous weight of motherhood, and the tenuous tether of life and death that exists both during and after childbirth. Someone who has evolved inside of you, a part of you, is now outside of you, yet still a part of you. How much of you do they carry that make a mother afraid? I am trying to make sense out of all of this, I suppose. Maternal: An Essay in 9 parts is an umbilical cord for this series of discerning meditations that attest motherhood is a particular way of listening.

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These are the poems about motherhood I’ve wished for and feared. Jennifer Flescher‘s clear-hearted, rending poems wreck our cozy deceptions and then tell us how to get through the night. Flescher’s methods mine maternity for its cultural gold: the physical pull, the solace in caretaking, the dread of what we pass along. Here the most subterranean, hidden stories – overcoming the wish to die, helping a son survive what harms him – are drawn with openness, terror, and precision. These human stories have no simple endings, as Flescher knows, just the beauty of the everyday within the struggle, “the rocks through the bottom // of the clear, clear merging.” Just the hope of arriving somewhere like you.