Description: Mouths Open to Name Her, Katie Bickham's dazzling new collection, resounds with the intensity of new motherhood and confronts the relationship between mothers and their children, as she explores what it means to carry a child, even one conceived by rape or "a child born from no place, from the flame of her forgetting, / bracket of blank pages. The boy, too, was destined to forget-- / a bird from no tree branch, fish from no river, sword from no forge." Moving from the mid-1800s to 2017, these finely wrought poems grapple with how war, violence, and enslavement can disrupt our innocence. Bickham emphasizes the power of creation in spite of this: "Just picture them all," she writes, "350,000 babies, together at once, / a city's worth of them in a row or a circle or wrapped / in an acres-wide blanket, an army of innocence yawning / their first breaths over the globe, and the promise / that it will all happen again, just like this, just as imperfectly, / no matter what, / tomorrow." Mouths Open to Name Her calls forth a global sisterhood that extends from Charleston, South Carolina, and Shreveport, Louisiana, to Nice, France; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the Serengeti District, Tanzania.
Brief description: Ava Leavell Haymon is the author of the poetry collections Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread, Kitchen Heat, and The Strict Economy of Fire. She teaches poetry writing in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and directs a writers' retreat center in the mountains of New Mexico.
Review Quotes: "What a wrenching and beautiful book is Mouths Open to Name Her, Katie Bickham's collection of poems about women, especially mothers, throughout history and around the world. She writes about war, and God, and torture, and slavery, forced sterilizations, medical experimentations, all the ills that female flesh is heir to. She writes about sex, and joy, and the love of a mother for her daughter, whom she saves from genital mutilation ('Serengeti District, Tanzania, 2017'). And she writes about courage, including the courage of a woman in a remote Mexican village who performs an unanesthetized Caesarean on herself, determined not to lose yet another child--and survives. So finally this is a praise book. Praise for the female principle--the goddess evoked by the volume's title, who's never visible but everywhere named. And praise for life itself, the 'Good News' of birth continuing, 'just like this, just as imperfectly, / no matter what, / tomorrow.'"--Ann Fisher-Wirth