Cadence

Having children fundamentally disrupts and remakes us, in terms of body, identity, perspective, and voice.

The world shrinks and exponentially expands. Our already-fraught human experience of time is shredded and magnified. Cadence captures the poet’s point of view as a new mother, reveling in a position of heightened vulnerability and ferocity.

The poems in this chapbook are breathless, hyperattentive to others’ needs, and equally in love with earthliness and repulsed by the monstrousness we enact/bear witness to. The central tenets of this chapbook: ideas of the body, pregnancy, and motherhood; how becoming a parent destabilizes the self; local anxieties (What if my child doesn’t eat enough?

How will I ever sleep again?) and global anxieties (How do we respond to these tumultuous times, full of such hate, racism, and xenophobia?

How do we help?); and the ever-deepening desire to protect those who are (increasingly) threatened.