Description

Milkweed Editions,paperback

Publication Date:November 9, 2021

Publisher Marketing:Day of the Childebbs and flows, expanding and contracting, reflective of the altered movement of time that passes through the tangle of motherhood and childhood.

From Arra Lynn Ross, a tender, generous, and generative extended poem centered on the experience of parenthood.

What is learned? Ill return for my son; / at school, at three thirty-eight, bells will ring & run / days over years. Using unpredictable syllabics, rhyme, and syntax,Day of the Childcaptures the sensation of altered time that accompanies a childs growth. Seasons come and go. A schoolboy becomes a dreaming infant becomes a five-year-old exploring metaphor for the first time becomes an ultrasound image, a frieze on screen. A mother cycles through her own often dissonant identities: soother, watcher, blame-taker. And both mother and child assume another, significant role: artistic collaborators.

ForDay of the Childis a poem co-created by child and mother, offering a space in which eachs stories, thoughts, wordsunbound / by Time & times delineationstangle together. In which apartnessOh indivisible divisible, the presence of another heart beating inside the mothers own bodyis continually negotiated. And in which the mother considers her place as intermediary between the child and the world: her protection, her complicity, her joy. Its octave pairs ebb and flow, expand and contract, producing a portrait of raising another human as refracted as it is circular, just as a river breaks into many suns, the sun. For, as the child asserts, love is a circl[e] round / as a Ball.

Challenging the notion that parenthood is not itself a poetic endeavor,Day of the Childmakes of childrearing a refrain I reframed each day with new words.