‘...an outstanding achievement that will, with its skill and elegance, deeply enrich Australian poetry and whoever reads it.’ Judges’ citation, 2013 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. Ali Cobby Eckermann, a Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha poet, is at the forefront of Australian Indigenous poetry. Inside My Mother is both a political and personal collection, angry and tender, propelled by the need to remember, yet brimming with energy and vitality – qualities that distinguished her previous, prize-winning verse novel, Ruby Moonlight. Tributes to country, to her elders, and to the animals and spirits that inhabit the landscape, coupled with the rhythms of mourning and celebration that pulse through the poems, make this a moving and personal collection. Grief is deeply felt and vividly portrayed in poems such as ‘Inside My Mother’ and ‘Lament’. There is defiance and protest in ‘Clapsticks’ and ‘I Tell You True’. In the final section there is a marked generational shift as the elders begin to pass away and the poet as grandmother comes to accept her rightful place as matriarch.

Shortly after Albert Cohen left France for London to escape the Nazis, he received news of his mother’s death in Marseille. Unable to mourn her, he expressed his grief in a series of moving pieces for La France libre, which later grew into Book of My Mother. Achingly honest, intimate, and moving, this love song is a tribute to all mothers. Cohen himself expressed, "I shall not have written in vain if one of you, after reading my hymn of death, is one evening gentler with his mother because of me and my mother."

I Carry My Mother is a book-length cycle of poems that explores a daughter's journey through her mother's illness and death. From diagnosis through yahrtzeit (one-year anniversary), the narrator grapples with what it means to lose a mother. The poems, written in a variety of forms (sonnet, pantoum, villanelle, sestina, terza rima, haiku, and others) are finely crafted, completely accessible, and full of startling, poignant, and powerful imagery. These poems will resonant with all who have lost a parent, relative, spouse, friend, or anyone whom they dearly love. In a passionate book, Lesléa Newman chronicles her mother's dying and the phases of her own grieving. She fuses an unsparing realism with lyrical intensity, in honest, direct, clear language, in mostly rhymed stanzas. The pages seem to tremble with an accurate description of changing emotional states, all born of the closeness, humor, and love in the mother-daughter relationship. -Naomi Replansky, author of The Dangerous World and Collected Poems. After the introductory poem I thought 'oh dear, I'm going to cry my way through the whole thing.' And then, the exquisite first-rate poetry-using forms like triolet and rondeau-took me to a much deeper place than tears can possibly reveal. This is a very beautiful book. -Judy Grahn, author of A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet. Throughout her long career, Lesléa Newman has distinguished herself by diving deep into the essentials of life and delivering them with a light touch. The poems in her new collection, I Carry My Mother, are both light and dark. They are small rituals that draw us closer to the child within, revealing the complex love between a vivacious mother and an independent daughter. Each verse is a spiritual chant; each line is a lyric glistening with grief. -Jewelle Gomez, author ofThe Gilda Stories and Oral Tradition. Using forms inspired by poets ranging from Wallace Stevens to Dr. Seuss, from Sir Philip Sidney to Elizabeth Bishop, Lesléa Newman's heartfelt poems are a loving tribute to her mother. The poems move back and forth between precise images of her mother in life-"her tiny feet/Her toenails painted candy-apple red," -and images of her mother as she dies-"a tiny, mottled lump of clay." I Carry My Mother allows us to look into a deeply personal portrait of a mother and daughter who are so much alike that when the daughter looks into the mirror, "my mother stares back." In the dedication, Newman writes, "may her memory be a blessing." These poems evoke and preserve those memories, showing how love lives on after death. -Ellen Bass, author ofLike a Beggar and The Human Line

My name is Sophie. This book is about me. It tells the heart-stoppingly riveting story of my first love. And also of my second. And, okay, my third love, too. It's not that I'm boy crazy. It's just that even though I'm almost fifteen I've been having sort of a hard time trying to figure out the difference between love and lust. It's like my mind and my body and my heart just don't seem to be able to agree on anything.

“You will devour these beautifully written—and very important—tales of honesty, pain, and resilience” (Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and City of Girls) from fifteen brilliant writers who explore how what we don’t talk about with our mothers affects us, for better or for worse. As an undergraduate, Michele Filgate started writing an essay about being abused by her stepfather. It took her more than a decade to realize that she was actually trying to write about how this affected her relationship with her mother. When it was finally published, the essay went viral, shared on social media by Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, and many others. This gave Filgate an idea, and the resulting anthology offers a candid look at our relationships with our mothers. Leslie Jamison writes about trying to discover who her seemingly perfect mother was before ever becoming a mom. In Cathi Hanauer’s hilarious piece, she finally gets a chance to have a conversation with her mother that isn’t interrupted by her domineering (but lovable) father. André Aciman writes about what it was like to have a deaf mother. Melissa Febos uses mythology as a lens to look at her close-knit relationship with her psychotherapist mother. And Julianna Baggott talks about having a mom who tells her everything. As Filgate writes, “Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them.” There’s relief in acknowledging how what we couldn’t say for so long is a way to heal our relationships with others and, perhaps most important, with ourselves. Contributions by Cathi Hanauer, Melissa Febos, Alexander Chee, Dylan Landis, Bernice L. McFadden, Julianna Baggott, Lynn Steger Strong, Kiese Laymon, Carmen Maria Machado, André Aciman, Sari Botton, Nayomi Munaweera, Brandon Taylor, and Leslie Jamison.

There are secrets in this family. Before Biff and her younger brother, Mark, there was baby Alison, who drowned in her bath because, it was said, her mother was distracted. Biff too, lives in fear of her mother's irrational behaviour and paranoia, and she is always on guard and fears for the safety of her brother. As Biff grows into teenage hood, there develops a conspiratorial relationship between her and her father, who is a famous and gregarious man, trying to keep his wife's problems a family secret. This was a time when the insane were committed and locked up in Dickensian institutions; whatever his problems her father was desperate to save his wife from that fate. But also to protect his children from the effects of living with a tragically disturbed mother...'In My Mother's Hands' is a beautifully written and emotionally perplexing coming-of-age true story about growing up in an unusual family.