Look Look Look

In this ravishingly honest collection of prose poems, Callista Buchen look look looks at every facet of mothering, from child loss to childbirth, from loss of self and alienation from the body to a hard-won and completely unsentimental empowerment— mother as process; “ mother as birthplace, where woman becomes location.” They embrace pregnancy’ s darkness, the monstrous cleaving of the birthing body, the milky flood of nursing, and the complex grief of the self that is estranged in the making of another human being. When the speaker comes into her authority it arrives less with triumph than with danger: “ There isn’ t a dam you can build that I can’ t break. Charisma, chiasma, power. See what I will do.” This is a book about mothering like no book about mothering that has ever been mothered forth."— Diane Seuss