Description: An intimate collection of poems about mothers and daughters, female friendship, and memory.
Rebecca Hart Olander's second poetry collection, Singing from the Deep End, chronicles coming of age in the '70s and '80s with a single mother, girlhood friends, the death of a dearest friend, and the poet's own dive into motherhood. Rooted in the rocky coastline of Gloucester, Massachusetts, these poems thrum with music, mirrors, granite quarries, the Atlantic, potholder looms, feathered hair, and repurposed garments. Singing from the Deep End navigates how our ever-changing bodies can betray us and be betrayed, treading through layered griefs and surfacing into joy and reclamation. Anchored in the lives of women, this poetic mixtape is a love song to mothers, children, girlhood, and friendship.Brief description:
Rebecca Hart Olander is the author of Dressing the Wounds, Uncertain Acrobats, and Singing from the Deep End. She has taught poetry at Amherst College, Smith College, Westfield State University, and through graduate and community writing programs. She is the editor and director of Perugia Press, a nonprofit feminist press publishing first and second full-length books of poetry by women.
Review Quotes:
Singing from the Deep End is an exploration of girlhood, womanhood, and motherhood, with all the attendant splendors and perils. Deeply rooted in the geography of Massachusetts, Olander's poems seek to enact the very process of becoming, a process that is both mysterious and inexorable. "How could I pin anything / to a page, when to be alive [is] an exercise in being lost?" the poet wonders. However, with tender description and memorable music, the spirit of delight prevails, keeping poet and poems aloft. "How / gorgeous and glowing it is to be human," she declares. Through the many transitions that shape a woman's life, Olander has "learned the alchemy / of mothers, turning base metals into gold."