MOTHERs

by Rachel Zucker

Literary Nonfiction. "MOTHERs is a howling storm of a book. In this desperately digressive essay, the poet Rachel Zucker narrates her complicated path to becoming and not becoming her mother, the storyteller Diane Wolkstein. Zucker turns her intelligent eye outward and inward, including everything she knows about mothers, stories, poems, and consequence itself. In mythic terms, the essay is about a poet who doesn't want to turn into a storyteller. But as in all myths of avoidance, Zucker must eventually tell a terrifyingly inevitable story."—Sarah Manguso

Genres: Poetry, Memoir, Nonfiction, Essays

164 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2013

About the author

Rachel Zucker is the author of Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Bad Wife Handbook (Wesleyan University, 2007), The Last Clear Narrative (Wesleyan University, 2004), Eating in the Underworld (Wesleyan University, 2003), and Annunciation (The Center for Book Arts, 2002), as well as the co-editor (with Arielle Greenberg) of Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (both from the University of Iowa Press). A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Zucker has taught at several institutions, including NYU and Yale. She currently lives in NYC with her husband and three sons, and is a certified labor doula.

For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/63-...

Reviews

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

An utterly original memoir by a poet who makes candor into an aesthetic approach. I know it's odd to say that such a thinky collage is be a page-turner, but I read this book breathlessly. Zucker approaches her mentors with sheer intelligence and angst, as we all do. I've never read anyone who has gotten at the complexity of female influences the way Zucker does. I was moved almost to tears by her comments on Alice Notley, a poet I also deeply admire.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s a lot I don’t know. Stories fill those gaps, either mine or others, and yet there are always gaps. Everything constructed is a fiction because the opposite is too unruly and impossible a task. One character can tap the whole, but only from their own perspective.

Rachel Zucker taps into her relationship with her biological mother, her mentor mothers, the myth of mothers, herself as a mother of three boys, but no daughter, and another m-word filtering it all through its bias: memory. A poet, her prose is poetic, fragmented, short bits, a collage of other poets’ poems and prose ebbing and flowing. It’s a mosaic to motherhood.

Universal at its core, the crust is personal: her fractured relationship with her mother, Diane Wolkstein. I had never heard of Wolkstein, a famous storyteller, even though she was New York City’s official storyteller from 1968 through 1971, a period of time when I lived in New York City and was just opening up to stories.

I began to mistrust my memory. Why had I never heard of Wolkstein? Part of me thought she was merely a fictional construct built as a foil for the narrator. It all felt too pat, but a good story always comes together roughly but right.

Zucker had me dip into the well of my memory and question. Her honesty made me honest, or at least try to view a situation from different perspectives without denying the validity of my own. An object can be a point or flat, but if we walk around it and accept the differing views as equally descriptive, our experience is enriched. We not only see, we become a part of the object looking at us.

That’s not Zucker’s story (paraphrasing a repeated line throughout her book), but it’s mine, or a part of mine, which now includes her thoughtful essay.

[Sigrun Hodne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this book several times and will continue reading it - . I've never read anything quite like it, speaking to heart & mind like this book does, touching my sense of life; or what it is to be a daughter, a mother & a writer.

[Peter Albanese · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very beautifully written. Too personal of a work for me to feel compelled to “rate it” which is how I always feel with art to some extent but especially this. Very important read for me as a man to gain perspective on how difficult being a mother is. The emotional and physical effects of childbirth. The natural strain on mother-daughter relationships. I feel lucky to have access to such an honest personal piece from someone but I am also devastated by the reality that it is published and released to the world. There’s a lot I don’t know though. Hope rachel is well

[Judith Rosenbaum · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book ten years ago and decided to reread it because the themes - mothering and being mothered, mentorship, creativity and selfhood - are on my mind. It’s a powerful, brave, deep, and provocative book.

[Delia Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

memoir in notes, diaries, snippets of rachel's childhood dreams written down by rachel's mother who was a professional story-teller, grief of the passing of caretakers, babies being born and unlatching, and all along looking for mothers everywhere. i also consider my fav writers (alice notley included) to be my mothers, and my mother is also a writer, except a very secretive and humble one. i appreciated how much rachel distrusts her memory, and how the stories we tell ourselves our whole lives are often not quite right. i am thinking about how rachel tells me that mothers are so painful bc we were born from our mothers, and therefore, mothers remind us of our mortality. fierce love, fierce abandonment. on a page in the library copy i was borrowing, it looked like someone spit out their tea, in small faded brown splotches, like finger prints. the page said: "what are you writing?" "are you doing a lot of writing?" "are you a writer/mother just like your mother?"

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. This book is powerful -- it's the author's raw, aching attempt to understand the complexity of a challenging mother-daughter relationship. While at it, she also explores the strange hurts that can occur in mentor-student relationships.

This book is a combination of poem and memoir. I've never read anything like it. I'm not sure how I feel about those final pages of the book (the letter and the epilogue). Very intense. Overall a great read.

[Adam Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant, lyrical, and deeply moving meditation on motherhood, both biological and literary.

[Rachel B · Rating 5 out of 5]

So honest and beautiful

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've found in this book extremely helpful frameworks for looking at memory and trauma: though Zucker is talking about motherhood and childbirth, the same examples work for other kinds of trauma or memory lapses. Writing in the elliptical style I call "poetry-essay", somewhat similar in form to Nelson's "The Argonauts" or Rakin's "Citizen", this selection of pieces describes Zucker's fraught relationship with her mother, a well-known writer, and her relations to other female mentors, including the poet Jorie Graham, and Zucker's own relationship to motherhood and writing. Though it's self-referential, and, in places, self-indulgent, I found this book moving, inspiring, and genuinely helpful in my understanding of myself and how I relate to a memory that is fractured due to trauma. I picked this book out of the poetry section at the library without any prior knowledge of it or its author: I'm so glad I did, because it's been moving, inspiring and surprising. I want to buy a copy for my own reference, and also foist this on various of my loved ones.

[Roxanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strangely compelling. I had trouble putting it down.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant, honest, searing exploration of motherhood, daughterhood, and memory. It felt like the author handed me her heart on a dinner plate.

[Georgia Cloepfil]

To resist the reality of time is to resist leaving childhood behind.

[Megan Alyse · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those books you won’t ever forget. An utterly all-encompassing and brilliant exploration of motherhood, grief, and female balance. This book made me sob and laugh. So original and so beautiful.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genius.