A01=Katie Bickham
AL
Argentina
atomic bomb
Author_Katie Bickham
birth
Buenos Aires
Category=DC
Charleston
conception
daughters
death
Dublin
Edenton
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
France
Germany
Hiroshima
Houma
Iran
Ireland
Japan
LA
Los Alamos
Magdeburg
Manhattan
Mexico
Missoula
Montgomery
motherhood
MT
NC
New Mexico
Nice
Nunavik Region
Oaxaca
Pearl River
pregnancy
Quebec
rape
SC
Serengeti District
Shreveport
slavery
sons
Tanzania
Tehran
war
Product details
- ISBN 9780807169872
- Weight: 333g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 13 Feb 2019
- Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Mouths Open to Name Her, Katie Bickham's dazzling new collection, resounds with the intensity of new motherhood and confronts the relationship between mothers and their children, as she explores what it means to carry a child, even one conceived by rape or ""a child born from no place, from the flame of her forgetting, / bracket of blank pages. The boy, too, was destined to forget, / a bird from no tree branch, fish from no river, sword from no forge."" Moving from the mid-1800s to 2017, these finely wrought poems grapple with how war, violence, and enslavement can disrupt our innocence. Bickham emphasises the power of creation in spite of this: ""Just picture them all,"" she writes, ""350,000 babies, together at once, / a city's worth of them in a row or a circle or wrapped / in an acres-wide blanket, an army of innocence yawning / their first breaths over the globe, and the promise / that it will all happen again, just like this, just as imperfectly, / no matter what, …/ …tomorrow."" Mouths Open to Name Her calls forth a global sisterhood that extends from Charleston, South Carolina, and Shreveport, Louisiana, to Nice, France; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the Serengeti District, Tanzania.
Katie Bickham is the author of The Belle Mar, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. Her work has appeared in Rattle, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Deep South Magazine, and elsewhere. She is assistant professor of English and creative writing at Bossier Parish Community College.
