Wax has outdone herself. These very personal poems also open their arms and let the wide world in. These are poems of a restless and searching intelligence, hungry to make crazy, wonderful leaps. What appears to be a Yiddish folk tale moves, without warning, from the shtetl to the camps. An extremely creepy spider takes up residence in the guest room. On the day Nelson Mandela is released from Robben Island, the narrator finds herself in the hospital singing “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” to a dying patient. And this is not to mention the mothers of the sly title, not who you think they are. Read the poems for the stories, the wit and the wordplay, and then come back a second and third time for the nuance, the subtle allusions and the heartache.
–Michele Herman, author of Save the Village and Just Another Jack: The Private Lives of Nursery Rhymes.
Starter Mothers is electric, charged with joy, sorrow, empathy, and insight. With abundant language, this compassionate narrator takes on fertility, grief, female energy, and resistance. “Her voice roused the sleeping,” she sings. As the collection unfolds, more and more rich wisdom, rooted in the here-and-now, spills onto the page: “Take your right hand, palm open / elbow bent, and slap your heart / for each of the six days of Creation.”
–Lisa Bellamy, author of The Northway and Nectar
Starter Mothers is bold, full of personality, unapologetic—these poems are artistic, perspicuous, and a stunning exploration and questioning of what it is to be female. Pamela Wax’s poems ask what it means to be woman without being mother—a question that pushes against definition, but her work also raises questions about women’s invisibility and thus how women can make themselves heard. Wax makes herself heard. She creates a space, “a hush in which to ponder important and messy things.”
–Katie Chaple, Author of Pretty Little Rooms
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