Mother-Ghosts

Leah Sewell’s exquisite collection MOTHER-GHOSTS devastates in the way that all the best poems do–with deft beauty and haunting honesty. With fierce mother-love and the fear that is born of it, these poems leave us reaching for a wisp of dream and clutching a child’s nightgown. Sewell’s mother-ghosts sweep readers with both lyric and emotional intensity, and like good mothers, they will never leave us, nor would we want them to. –Amy Fleury, author of SYMPATHETIC MAGIC and BEAUTIFUL TROUBLE Could there be a more apt title for this collection than MOTHER-GHOSTS? If so, I can’t imagine what that is. Specters and visitants permeate the collection as does the vast realm of what it means to mother or be a mother. The voices of Annie Oakley, Baba Yaga and Belle Starr are heard in this collection (among others) and their significance is felt individually, but are made even more powerful by their juxtaposition with the other poems. Their disembodied voices no more haunting than the speaker’s as she recounts the journey from innocence to experience, revealing how too quickly and too soon the two can be intertwined. — Teri Youmans Grimm, from the introduction, author of DIRT EATERS and BECOMING LYLA DORE