Summary:

When Gerald is three, his mother, a drug addict, leaves him alone one time too often and he accidentally sets the apartment on fire. His mother is imprisoned for negligence, he goes to the hospital, and thereafter lives with "Aunt Queen," a great-aunt who exercises considerable authority from her wheelchair, and gives him all the love his mother hasn't.

When he is 9, however, his mother returns with a new sister and a man who claims to be the sister's father. They want to take him "home"; Gerald wants to stay with Aunt Queen. The matter is settled unhappily when Aunt Queen dies of a heart attack.

Gerald soon learns to despise his stepfather for his violence and, eventually, for the abuse of his half sister, which she hides out of fear until she's driven to confess it to Gerald in hope of his protection. Their mother remains in denial about that problem as well as her own and her husband's addictions to alcohol and drugs.

Caring for his sister, however, keeps love in Gerald's life. In defending her one last time, the apartment catches fire and his stepfather is killed. As he, his sister, and his mother ride away in the ambulance, a flicker of hope survives in the darkness for another new chapter in family life, this time without violence.

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This is a rich and diverse anthology of poetry and of prose extracts, both fictional and non-fictional, about becoming a parent. It is organized into three chronological sections: "First Stirrings," about becoming and being pregnant (or of having a pregnant partner: the father’s perspective is refreshingly well-represented throughout), "The Welcoming," about labor and birth, and bringing home the newborn, and "Now That I am Forever With Child," about being the parent of an infant.

Each section contains a cross-section of views, from, for instance, Elizabeth Spires’s languid letter to the fetus inside her to Rosemary Bray’s candid account of her ambivalence about being pregnant; from Julianna Baggott’s thoughts on the Madonna and child, and A. S. (Antonia Susan) Byatt ’s rather frightening description of giving birth in a British hospital in the 1960s, to Hunt Hawkins’s sad poem about holding his dying newborn daughter; and from Jesse Green’s memoir as a gay parent adopting a son to Kate Daniels’s prayer for her children.

The anthology ends with the powerful poem by Audre Lorde that gives its title to the book’s last section. Lorde encapsulates the astonishing change of focus and identity at the heart of becoming a parent.

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One 1970s summer, Madeleine L'Engle brings her mother to Crosswicks, the rambling country house where the extended family has spent extended vacations for many years. At ninety, the elder Madeleine is suffering from the ravages of the now vanished diagnosis, 'hardening of the arteries.' By times she is frightened, angry, or difficult; at night she cries out or tries to wander. Round-the-clock caregivers help with the strain, while the writer's own children and grandchildren figure in her journal with concern, affection, and wonder.

The presence of the dwindling old lady provokes detailed recollections--direct and indirect memories--of the lives of her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, all named Madeleine--bringing the span of this narrative to six generations. Despite the grandmother's slow mental decline, death comes suddenly, while L'Engle is away and her son is left to help.

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This delightful, provocative collection is subdivided into five sections that are not easily categorized. Rios, who grew up in the borderland culture of Nogales, Arizona, writes about this culture and his childhood (sections 1,5), family and local legends (section 1), the Sonoran desert and its animal life (section 4) and the complexities and wonder of human experience and human relationships (all sections). Rios deals with both the real and the imagined, often moving from the former to the latter. Deceptively simple language lures the reader into the rich, original landscape of the poet’s vision.

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Reta Winters, a 44-year-old translator and writer, faces a crisis in her otherwise ordinary and loving family life when her oldest daughter Norah suddenly and without explanation decides to live on the streets of Toronto, with a sign around her neck that reads GOODNESS. The novel, written in Reta's voice, is the story of her and her family's efforts to cope and make sense of this event. But it is also the story of the everydayness of her life and her feminist ruminations on the writing process, motherhood, friendship, and marriage.

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This is a memoir of the author's troubled teen years. It begins in 1955 with Toby and his divorced mother driving west from Florida, running from her abusive boyfriend and with the cockeyed scheme of striking it rich in the Utah uranium fields. When that doesn't work out, they go on to the West Coast, where the mother moves around in search of work and fends off that boyfriend and a number of other undesirable suitors. Tragically, she finally marries Dwight, a controlling and abusive man who makes both her and Toby miserable.

Much of the memoir deals with Toby's desperate and often destructive attempts to survive under Dwight's reign of terror. Toby neglects his schoolwork and runs with some bad characters, and toward the end of the book he carries off an astonishing series of falsifications that leads to his being accepted for admission at a prestigious prep school. He doesn't last, and he winds up enlisting in the army, where he strangely feels "a sense of relief and homecoming."

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It is 1965. Graduate student, Adam Appleby (the name is significant), twenty-five years old and father of three, is terrified that his wife, Barbara, is pregnant again. He loves her and is faithful, but their commitment to Catholicism turns their sex life into a furtive obsession, encumbered with calendars, thermometers, and guilt.

This day in his life, like all others, is spent in the British Museum, researching an interminable thesis on 'the long sentence' in minor English writers. But Adam cannot concentrate for frustration, anxiety (over Barbara's delayed period), and financial despair. When a young descendant of a minor writer tries to seduce him in exchange for a steamy manuscript that could easily make his career, Adam discovers a shocking willingness to compromise on his principles.

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Daughter of a wealthy businessman, tall, beautiful Emily Stockwell Turner falls out of love with her stolid professor husband, Holman, halfway through their first semester at a small college for men in northern New England. She is lonely and miserable in this remote place. Encouraged by her confidante and fellow faculty wife, Miranda, she embarks on a secret affair with the college musician, Will Thomas.

Divorced and sexually experienced, Will initiates Emmy into the powerful romance of physical love. But their on-again, off-again relationship is fraught by its own secrecy, Holman's jealous suspicions, Will's infidelities, Emmy's lies, Miranda's disingenuous disinterest, and the not-so-irrational hatred that Freddy, Emmy's four-year old son, bears Will.

Emmy and Will take ever greater risks with their clandestine encounters; eventually they admit to being truly in love and she decides to join him in his move to New York City. But Holman falls ill and nearly loses his contract position at the University when he tries to kill a student demonstrator whom he wrongly suspects of being Emmy's lover. Emmy postpones her departure indefinitely, because Holman "needs" her more.

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This is a portrait of the head and upper body of a woman who sits leaning back against her chair. The view is at an angle so that we see primarily the left side of her face. Her left eye seems to be looking vacantly into space while her right eye appears almost closed. Her mouth is slightly open--she seems to be smiling faintly but she looks weary.

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Summary:

This book contains 47 poems about the accidental drowning of the author's son, Andrew, when he was almost six years old. This cycle of elegiac poems begins with the author's memory of Andrew's birth, then quickly plunges into the specifics of his drowning and the details of his family's daily life and survival since. All of the poems are excellent--direct and well crafted.

Outstanding poems include "The Boxes," which recounts how the police searched the author's house when she first reported her child missing; "Wet," in which Andrew's grandfather comes to his house for a blanket with which to cover his newly-discovered body; "The Limousine" and "Thomas Birthday" which describe the funeral and the birthday party held the day after the funeral for Andrew's older brother, showing how grief and happiness collide; "The Pearl," in which the author laments all things undone and not said, yet recognizes that "The pain that has come between us / will someday be our pearl"; "Faded," which expresses a common fear: that if grief fades, so will memory of the loved one; "Communion," in which, on the first anniversary of Andrew's death, the author mimics the religious ritual as she eats peanut butter and jelly at her son's place at the table, drinks from his plastic cup: "When I finished, / I wiped my eyes with your napkin, / gave thanks, / ate the bread and drank the milk."

Other important poems are "Dust," "In Our Beds," "Again," "Foxes," "The Dance," "Your Questions" (a long poem in which she speaks to those who wonder how she can bear such loss), "To My Parents," "Driving" (a stunning poem in which the author, years after Andrew's death, thinks she sees him in a passing car), and "I Thirst." In this last and final poem, the author's lines might well be taken to heart by all caregivers: "Fear of loss / and walls of self protection / will kill me / long before a broken heart. / I pray, / let every death / break me so."

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