Kirjahaku

What is the embodied shape of memory? How is it cared for and set down into the hearts of future generations? Where lives the land of forgetting? Throughout these poems, April Tierney weaves together personal, collective, ancestral, and land-based memory into a single, glistening cloth. She courts the cultural necessity of tending to what might otherwise be lost, by writing her way into the past as a prayer for what is yet to come.

In Earth-based cultures, Mothers are held at the center. As life-bearers, they are treated with the same care and respect as Mother Earth. However, in industrialized societies where the Earth is both exploited and neglected, Mothers are, too. Throughout her new collection, Tierney explores some of the stories and realities of mothering within an anthropocentric, capitalistic, nuclear family paradigm-stories that have often been repressed or dismissed. It is an honest, harrowing, and deeply tender portrayal of early motherhood, one that honors the humanity and complexity of this central role.