In this extraordinary portfolio of poetry, J. Hope Stein evokes the disorienting wonder and awe of early motherhood. Marked by a startling defamiliarization of experiences we only thought we knew, these spare, imaginative poems offer a radical intervention into the established order of things. In Stein’s deft hand, the masculine recedes into the middle distance, and the seemingly small details of maternal life loom larger than life. The fiction writer Paul Harding once said of good writing that “the intelligence is in the humor.” Here are poems as mischievous and strange as they are rich in their emotional and philosophical truths.
