Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing

Poetry. For a limited time, this book is discounted to $15 to celebrate Mother's Day 2008. Contains work by Rae Armantrout, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Lee Ann Brown, Maxine Chernoff, Norma Cole, Gillian Conoley, Stacy Doris, Carolyn Forche, Kathleen Fraser, Fanny Howe, Elizabeth Robinson, Anne Waldman, Adrienne Rich, Susan M. Schultz and many many more. 460+ pages!

The poets in this anthology have been ravished, whacked, illuminated, blown away by the experience of motherhood. The thousand experiences. The thousand interruptions. The fact that it is never what we expected, and that it is overwhelmingly intense. The intensity of the poems here bespeaks both the power of maternity in bending us to its will, and the power of the artist to resist-while-submitting. Nobody here plays a standard mom role, although there are numerous gestures in the direction of things moms do, like nurse babies and persist through exhaustion. . . . The poetry makes the difference. This is a book of experimental _poetry, poetry that experiments with how it sits on the page, and with diction, syntax, location and dislocation, and with emotion and intelligence, with elements of language at peace and at war. Grace under pressure, maybe, and maybe not. Comedy, brutality, farce, mystery, ecstasy, reality. Details. Abstractions.