'We find ourselves in love or out of it; in a friendship but with an enemy; under contract; inscribed by the law; giving birth; accompanied by ghosts; making pacts; in pursuit of a lost object; oriented towards new and unknown attachments.
'We find ourselves in a relation, even when that relation is broken or non-reciprocal.
'This book is about relations and their ambiguous intimacies. The three poems approach the question of how to endure, survive, destroy or protect the relationships that both constrain and make life possible.
'I wrote these poems while reading the work of Andrew Brooks, Brandon Brown, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Silvia Federici, Elena Gomez, Stefano Harney, Saidiya Hartman, C L R James, Fred Moten, Jordy Rosenberg, Hortense Spillers, Wendy Trevino and Frank Wilderson III. The three poems that comprise this book are in debt to these thinkers and should be read as marginal notes to their ideas.
'One way to perceive relations is to study them intently and to construct a poetics in their shadow.'
Source: Author's blurb (via Cordite).
'For a long time after my daughter was born, I looked for representations of motherhood everywhere. I looked for it in casual interactions with other mothers in the park and on the street, I looked for it with friends, in mothers’ groups and on the screen. I looked for it in my memories of mothers (including my own), and I looked for it in books. In the first six-weeks or so after my daughter was born I tore through Elisa Albert’s After Birth and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work. I remember them like balm, even though I cannot remember much of the content of either book now. I read and re-read Maya Angelou, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, Maggie Nelson and Adrienne Rich all of whom I had read before but reading them as a mother felt different. I read Elena Ferrante for the first time and was in awe at the way she wrote about mothers. I read Deborah Levy’s fiction and nonfiction and thought her novel Hot Milk would have been more satisfying had it been a nonfiction account of the central mother-daughter relationship (reading into that novel Levy’s complicated relationship with her mother). I heard the poet Rachel Zucker interviewed about her book MOTHERs on a parenting podcast and when I bought that book, I tore through it too. Again, balm. I read Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty and though aspects of the book annoyed me, I was grateful for it.' (Introduction)
'For a long time after my daughter was born, I looked for representations of motherhood everywhere. I looked for it in casual interactions with other mothers in the park and on the street, I looked for it with friends, in mothers’ groups and on the screen. I looked for it in my memories of mothers (including my own), and I looked for it in books. In the first six-weeks or so after my daughter was born I tore through Elisa Albert’s After Birth and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work. I remember them like balm, even though I cannot remember much of the content of either book now. I read and re-read Maya Angelou, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, Maggie Nelson and Adrienne Rich all of whom I had read before but reading them as a mother felt different. I read Elena Ferrante for the first time and was in awe at the way she wrote about mothers. I read Deborah Levy’s fiction and nonfiction and thought her novel Hot Milk would have been more satisfying had it been a nonfiction account of the central mother-daughter relationship (reading into that novel Levy’s complicated relationship with her mother). I heard the poet Rachel Zucker interviewed about her book MOTHERs on a parenting podcast and when I bought that book, I tore through it too. Again, balm. I read Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty and though aspects of the book annoyed me, I was grateful for it.' (Introduction)
