Kirjahaku

Katie Bickham's poems, set on a Louisiana plantation from 1811 through 2005, speak through the imagined voices of slaves, masters, mistresses, servants, and children. Focused on events that take place in a single room within the plantation home, Belle Mar, she offers an unflinching portrayal of the atrocities that form an undeniable part of Louisiana's history. The fully rounded characters she evokes allow readers to contemplate the social forces that shaped a slave-holding society and perpetuated injustices long after abolition. Tell me, Mother, how to remember you, what name to call you and what to absolve. Tell me how to live on this land. How many times must I scour and sun the long line of our lives until the water runs clean. -from ""Parlor 2012

Mouths Open to Name Her, Katie Bickham's dazzling new collection, resounds with the intensity of new motherhood and confronts the relationship between mothers and their children, as she explores what it means to carry a child, even one conceived by rape or ""a child born from no place, from the flame of her forgetting, / bracket of blank pages. The boy, too, was destined to forget, / a bird from no tree branch, fish from no river, sword from no forge."" Moving from the mid-1800s to 2017, these finely wrought poems grapple with how war, violence, and enslavement can disrupt our innocence. Bickham emphasises the power of creation in spite of this: ""Just picture them all,"" she writes, ""350,000 babies, together at once, / a city's worth of them in a row or a circle or wrapped / in an acres-wide blanket, an army of innocence yawning / their first breaths over the globe, and the promise / that it will all happen again, just like this, just as imperfectly, / no matter what, …/ …tomorrow."" Mouths Open to Name Her calls forth a global sisterhood that extends from Charleston, South Carolina, and Shreveport, Louisiana, to Nice, France; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the Serengeti District, Tanzania.