The Wife/Mom

The Wife/Mom
Seashell Books, USA.
2019. Buy It Here.

It is not so effortless for women to integrate their roles. Whereas women are pushed to "accomplish," they are simultaneously chided for embracing traditional female functions.

Women who have advanced degrees, 401Ks, or late model sports cars receive more positive feedback from men, and from women, who have taken on "men's jobs," than do gals who deign to define themselves by: how actively they engage in communication with their spouses, how mindfully they proceed through their pregnancies, and how well they nurture their sons, daughters, and, later, their grandchildren. Simply, as a society, we've made girls into boys, while dismissing any reverence we had for them for being girls.

The Wife/Mom explores possible answers to this dilemma by addressing communal stances on both visible and hidden, gender-based strata. This assemblage of poetry puts front and center our culture's need to return to cherishing women as women and to esteeming "womanly" goings on, per se. In these poems, females might be intrepid visionaries laboring in complex math, might be maestros of major orchestras, or might be Olympic athletes, but they are beloved first and foremost for being women.

This book celebrates leaky breasts, postpartum vaginas, and the complexities of striving to not have a favorite child. Likewise, this work insists that we embrace the activities of women not in lieu of the activities of men, but in addition to them. In these pages, electing to drink pickle juice is as important as being able to order 1947 Domaine Faiveley Musingy Grand Cru. Here, homespun rhetoric gets valued alongside of sophisticated, political maneuvering. In this collection, the assorted emotions indigenous to the finer gender get played out not as hysteria, but as probable, important responses to significant, human moments.

The Wife/Mom posits that we ought not to incarcerate ladies in insane asylums or minimize their convergent media sound bites. Female views must count.

Whereas there's nothing theoretically wrong with women venturing into space, growing up to be publishers, or running the kitchens of fine restaurants, there is much, which is matter-of-factly incorrect, with upbraiding women for choosing to spend some or all of their time taking care of their families. Hence, in The Wife/Mom, being a committed partner and being a mother receive all manner of long overdue applause.

Preface

Introduction: The Wife Mom

1. Personal Spheres
The Five to Eight Parent
Hela
Summer Bride
Abandoned at the Insane Asylum
Fantastic and Incendiary
Superimposed
The Wanderer
Geeky Bitterness
Looking at You Looking at Him
Life's Progressions
Geese
On Hanging Laundry
We Walk Honeysuckle Plus Jasmine
Natural Death
Wild Mama
White Hairs Dance the Zambra
Personal Rules of Interpretation
To Give to You My Years

2. Bud
I Observed the World
Hold my Hands
Trees Yield
Me and Super Fool: Surprise Catharsis for an Adolescent's Imaginings
Chickaree's Dais
Lava Bits Dancing: Lovers' Lament
Primeval Battles' Lessons
Puppies' Playful Stance
So, Sometimes We Fail
Where This Assemblage Succeeds
Duties Indigenous to Possessing a Magical Stone
Marked Distress and Impairment
Death of Slowpoke
A Recession-Proof Job
Words
Lost Potential after Lambing
Fritzi: A Child's Comfort
Pupppies' Playful Stance
Kitten

3. Interpersonal Spheres
At Three, the World Attempted Me
The Queen Postured
Spoiled Family Traditions
So Many Do-Bees
For Annmarie: Loving Cysts Forever and Always
Lady Beasts Scurrying Beneath Social Gravities
Perhaps Whale Neurons: Life-Saving Work
Perspicacious Girls
Horse Whisperings
Penguin Rhapsody
Far Stars
Floccinaucinihilipilification
We've Learned It's Moot
Words that Glide Past Cryptid Hunters
Because of the Debauchery in Their Homes: Unwarranted Cultural Snobbery
Death by Almond Butter
Acts of Ethical Communication
Economically Confused

4. Flower
To Deter Distance's Cravings
Deconstructing Literature's Intercultural Mythos
Nonetheless, Encouraged States
Growing Like Lemongrass
Sansen Sessions and Woodland Sprints
A Vanity Press or a Piece of Self-publishing Software
The Elusiveness of a Royal Title
Except for the Lops
Where the Woods Part
Asymptotic Nonsense
Marcelled
Broken Mouse Ears
Palimony's Worse
Me and My Lonesome
The City Man, His Lecture Notes, The Flesh Menagerie
While Dancing Elsewhere the Mortise and Tenon
Getting Sieved
His One Hundred Styles

5. Public Spheres
Spinning Solid, Linguistic, Pretty Lines
Sussing It Out on Planet Betty
TEOTWAWKI
In the Clinic Waiting Room
The Momentum of Needles that Kill
Sauntering around Remote Corners
Waysides plus Soda Machines
Snowing in Austin
Gators Packed Like Multinationals in Excelsior
Of a Population that Relies
Vendomatics in Urban Places
The World of Quiet, Sad Rich People
Home, to Jerusalem
Cosmic Quiet
Malka's Monthly Rosh Chodesh Group
Scorning Dragons over Lost Burial Rites
Biting into Bok Choy
Media Shamans
Politics, Like Sardines

6. Capsule
Happy Crazy
Clouds of Bad Attitude Precede Rainbows
Culling Boojums
Saponaceous Byways
Some Small Lizards
Principally Relic
The Laughing Man's Eyes
Discarded because of Other Considerations
Cold Enough to See
A Jay and Its Mate
Long after Conventioneers
For this Poetic Moment
At the Old Café
My Words Preserve
Essence Walking
Complex, Arcane and Difficult
Grass Growing
Sad
Loincloth Divulgences
Old-Fashioned Writing Implements' Relative Utility

Conclusion: Drinking Pickle Juice

Acknowledgments

Credits

About the Author