The Mother’s Tongue

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Poems in The Mother’s Tongue move in images of the living world that include plants and creatures both Native and non-Native to American landscapes. These poems move via persona and personal lyric through expressions of ambivalence about choosing the life of the body-of womanhood and motherhood-through the strange realm of pregnancy into the netherworld of the post-partum period and out into the world again, into the enlarged world, the world at war, the world of work and words. Finally these poems move toward ways to enter the world of women as transformed within the love of language, of Ojibwe language and English, of first language in the mouths of infants and the language of women just discovering the power of their own tongues as they teach speech, to teach desire-to speak the mother’s tongue.